Laura Glesby file photo
Typhanie Jackson: "There are some places where we have had some gaps."
High burnout rates, low pay, and insufficient state funding have led to an untenable shortage of special education staff in New Haven public schools.
School employees and parents conveyed that message to Education Committee alders — calling attention to lapsed services for some of the city’s highest-needs students.
They did so as the mayors from Connecticut’s five biggest cities have teamed up to press the governor and state legislature to increase state funding for local school districts more broadly, and for municipal special education services in particular. Gov. Ned Lamont has responded by proposing a $40 million hike to the state’s primary reimbursement model for special education costs. (See more on that below.)
At City Hall on Jan. 22, meanwhile, Education Committee alders hosted a workshop on the state of special education in New Haven Public Schools (NHPS), revealing the district’s challenges with burnout and staff retention among special education staff.
Student Services Executive Director Typhanie Jackson reported to alders that as of November 2024, more than 3,000 NHPS students received special education services to support a disability.
Special education covers students with a wide range of needs, including neurodivergent kids, kids with learning disabilities such as dyslexia, kids with physical disabilities such as visual or hearing impairments, and kids with mental health diagnoses, among others.
Under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), students whose disabilities interfere with their education are entitled to an Individualized Educational Program (IEP)— which can lead kids to get pulled out of class for shorter periods of academic or therapeutic support, placed into a specialized classroom, or in some cases (for about 300 kids, according to Jackson) sent to a private institution deemed to be more capable of serving their needs.
According to New Haven Federation of Teachers (NHFT) Vice President Jenny Graves, the district’s Applitrak system currently reports 14 special education teacher vacancies, six psychologist vacancies, two social worker vacancies, and multiple speech and language pathologist vacancies.
Graves noted that even if all of these vacancies were filled, a district committee determined in March 2023 that NHPS would need to hire another 30 special education teachers, 65 special education paraprofessionals, 16.5 full-time social workers, 6 school psychologists, 20 speech and language pathologists, and 11 school counselors in order to meet its own “best practice” guidelines. These additional positions would cost nearly $8 million, she said.
At the Education Committee meeting, Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller pressed NHPS leadership on the impact of the staff shortages on students.
“I hear from a lot of parents who feel that their kids’ IEPs are not being met, and it seems to me given the staffing it would be impossible to actually meet the IEPs,” she said.
“I wouldn’t say ‘No, the IEPs are not being met,’” replied Jackson. “I definitely know there are some places where we have had some gaps… I wouldn’t say they’re not being met. I would say we would have optimal services if our caseloads were according to the staffing guidelines.”
NHFT President Leslie Blatteau offered a different assessment.
“IEPs are not being complied with. Those are legal documents,” she said in an interview. “We’re sounding the alarm here that there are not enough resources in place to ensure that students’ needs are met.”
According to NHFT Vice President Graves, “In the last year or two, we’re facing more of a retention issue than a recruitment issue.” She reported at the aldermanic meeting that during the 2023 – 2024 school year, the district gained 33 special education teachers — while losing 30 of those teachers. The district gained five social workers and lost eight, she added.
Michelle Labrador, a paraprofessional who works in a special education classroom at the high school level — and who’s also a parent of a special ed student — argued that special ed staff are leaving at such high rates because “they can’t afford to stay.”
“As a para, I feel like sometimes at the bottom of the totem pole,” Labrador said. She said she makes $900 every two weeks to work in a classroom of students with a wide array of complex needs, including multiple non-speaking kids and wheelchair users. “You’re giving 150 percent because you chose to give the extra 50 . … Then again, as a special ed parent, I’m hoping the staff at my son’s school is doing the same thing as well.”
Graves also attributed the retention problem to burnout associated with “very high caseloads” and “unrealistic expectations,” she said.
“As each year goes by, it has been increasingly difficult to do my job in a thorough and ethical manner,” said Su-Lin Carbonelli, the school social worker for High School in the Community, who said she has a caseload of 54 students with IEPs.
Education Committee Chair and Annex Alder Sal Punzo noted that the school district spends about $25 million on private tuition for 300 “high needs” students whom the public school system cannot adequately serve — plus another $4 million or so on transportation for those students. He asked school leadership whether the school system is considering building up an equivalent program for those students within the school system.
NHPS Supt. Madeline Negrón agreed that a public program for those students would “save money,” both in terms of tuition and transit costs, in the long term. The hurdle, she said, is that “we have to find the money” upfront in order to build such a program.
The state’s Excess Cost Grant system was designed to help districts pay for these additional special education expenses, intending to cover the portion private tuition costs that exceed 4.5 times the district’s average cost per student.
However, the state has only partially funded this grant system. According to the School + State Finance Project, schools districts were reimbursed for 64 to 75 percent of their calculated excess costs in Fiscal Year (FY) 2024.
Gov. Ned Lamont has proposed adding $40 million to the Excess Cost Grant in FY 2027 — a 20 percent increase from the grant’s current $181,119,782 in funding.
The proposals fell short of what some education advocates had called for. According to CT News Junkie, Sen. Cathy Osten, a Sprague Democrat who co-chairs the Appropriations Committee, said that the $40 million is “not even close” to what’s needed, covering about a third of the funding gap.
Another fiscal challenge, Negrón told the alders, is the inflexibility of school funding systems to account for mid-year changes in the student body. If, for example, a high-needs student arrives at the district mid-year and needs to be placed in a private institution, Negrón said, “All of a sudden we would have to find about $183,000 just to support one child.”
Lamont has also proposed a $14 million grant program for 2027 to help school districts build out internal special education programs, with the ultimate goal of reducing private tuition costs.
Blatteau additionally pointed to the state’s Educational Cost Sharing formula — which determines state funding for school districts in part based on the needs of each student population, which is slated to fully increase funds for higher-needs school districts by FY 2026 — as a potential avenue for addressing special education funding shortages. She called on the formula to account for the number of special education students in a given district, on top of existing factors such as low-income and multi-lingual students.
This funding, Blatteau argued, should come from loosening the state’s self-imposed budgetary restrictions, often called “fiscal guardrails.”
It should also come from higher taxes on the wealthiest residents of one of the country’s most unequal states, Blatteau added.
“We need more people. We need more classrooms,” Graves told the alders in January. “I know they create another self-contained classroom every year. It does not make a dent.”
“It is very disheartening,” she added, “to not meet the needs of your students.”