Paid Special Education Credential Pathway to Fully Staff Schools
We hope that everyone is making the most of your well-deserved break as we all recharge and prepare to ramp up our contract campaign next school year. The overarching demand in our bargaining platform is fully-staffed, stable and inclusive schools and through our collective organizing efforts last school year, we elevated the ongoing special education vacancies in our district as a key issue that we must tackle together.
The special education staffing crisis impacts our vulnerable students with disabilities by depriving them of educators who can provide targeted support to meet their individual needs. It’s also a problem we will continue to face moving forward: Like other districts throughout the country, our number of new teachers in special education credential programs has not recovered to what it was before the pandemic.
In January, SDEA union educators from throughout the district rallied at the board meeting at the Ed Center to highlight the lack of progress on implementing concrete solutions to staff vacant special education positions. In March, we proposed a package of improvements to fully staff special education as part of our We Can’t Wait contract campaign demands:
- $4000 yearly stipend for education specialists
- Monthly stipend for special education teachers over contractual caseload caps
- A monthly case management day where education specialists are released from instruction by a visiting teacher
- A pathway for educators to add a Special Education credential paid for by the District, to help fill vacancies
SDEA special education leaders who have absorbed month after month of caseload overages also recently met with all five of the SDUSD board members to convey our urgency to explore all possible solutions to fill special education vacancies and get our highest need students the supports they deserve. While this resulted in some progress and got us closer to resolving the unionwide grievance related to exceeding contractual contract caps from last school year and the previous one, we know that this is a band-aid that doesn’t address the larger problem of the ongoing staffing crisis.
As part of our agreement with the District to offset retirements from the Supplemental Early Retirement Plan (SERP), the District has already agreed to pay for SDEA bargaining unit members, including those on temporary contracts, early childhood educators and visiting teachers, to add a Special Education credential in exchange for committing to work in a Special Education vacancy. For those who have already enrolled in a program or who are interested in participating, make sure to fill out the District’s interest form by June 30, 2025 (Note: You will need to be logged into your District email). Check out the SDEA Special Education Credential Pathway hub for extensive answers to Frequently Asked Questions and other resources.
