Sunnyside special-education director outlines staffing challenges and program changes
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Summary
Director Maura Engel presented district special-education enrollment, new restrictive placements, classroom staffing plans and recruitment/retention strategies amid statewide shortages.
Maura Engel, the district’s new director of special education, gave the board a high-level status report Tuesday on specialized programs, staffing and enrollment trends.
Engel said the district serves 2,053 students with individualized education programs (IEPs), which she described as roughly 16% of Sunnyside’s student population. "It's a pretty good amount of students that we have that we work with," Engel said.
She listed the district’s self-contained program counts for students with autism and other significant disabilities: Los Niños, three classrooms; Mission Manor, five classrooms; Rivera, one classroom; Apollo, one classroom; and Sunnyside High School, one classroom for autism self-contained placements. For social-emotional self-contained programs she said there are 33 students distributed with Sierra (10), Desert View (10) and Sunnyside High School (13). For students with intellectual and multiple disabilities she said 117 students are in self-contained classrooms with program locations including Santa Clara (three classrooms), Challenger (one), Apollo (one), Desert View (two) and Sunnyside High School (four).
Engel described two newly created restrictive (D‑level) placements for students with very significant behavioral or medical needs: Mission Manor, which accepted four additional students, and a new program at Los Ranchitos currently serving one student. She said typical self-contained classrooms in the district will staff one teacher and three paraprofessionals/PCAs, with most classrooms serving 10–12 students.
Engel and board members discussed workforce pressures. The special-education director said the district has been unable to fill several specialized roles and relies on vendor contracts in some areas: five vendor speech-language pathologists and three vendor psychologists were in use at the time of the report, and vacancies existed for occupational therapists and adaptive physical-education teachers. "There aren't enough people going into the field," Engel said, noting a high statewide burnout rate and an average three-year tenure for new special-education teachers.
On funding, Engel said the district primarily relies on maintenance-and-operation (M&O) funds for program costs and uses IDEA (federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) funds where applicable; she said IDEA allocations had been reduced this past year.
Engel outlined retention and recruitment steps, including increased training for general- and special-education staff, adding program specialists (Jerry Holmes and Thad Dugan), and building deeper university partnerships to attract interns; she said the district had four interns this year from programs including Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona.
"Fair isn't everybody getting the same thing. Fair is everybody getting what they need in order to be successful," Engel said, summarizing the department’s approach to inclusion and supports.
