COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- Columbus City Schools is facing a special education teacher shortage.
As the district works to fill these critical positions, it is also facing a growing number of students requiring this specialized support. Now, a CCS special education teacher is speaking out to NBC4 Investigates as she said staffing shortages and an overload of students are hurting everyone involved.
Why Columbus fire officials are saying there’s a critical vehicle shortageShe asked to remain anonymous to avoid backlash. However, she wanted to speak up because she feels the district is not handling the shortage well.
"We're just babysitting,” the district intervention specialist said. “We're not helping anyone.”
About 10% of Columbus City Schools' total intervention specialists, commonly called special education teachers, quit in 2024.
"If we could hire 30 teachers tomorrow, we would do so,” Columbus City Schools Executive Director of Accelerated and Extended Learning Mikki Nelson said. “It's not a matter of not being willing to do it. It's a matter of not having a pool of candidates.”
So, the district is getting creative and what leaders are doing has some CCS staff concerned.
Columbus City Schools reverting to birth names catches students, teachers off guard"What we've had to do is make that, quite frankly, tough decision to ensure that every student that is in our district has a licensed intervention specialist," Nelson said.
That decision is a “reassignment” and is what happened to the teacher we spoke with.
"I was pulled from my school that I've been there for a long time and placed into a severe MD unit. Nonverbal. And I like told them, I have no training of doing any of the work with these students," the woman said, who added her license is for teaching children with mild to moderate disabilities.
"I didn't know how to change students, I didn't know how to feed them or to lead my own classroom," she said.
"Obviously, that's always a concern because a license doesn't tell the whole story, so we, throughout the year, provide ongoing professional development and support," Nelson said.
Franklin County sales tax increase now in effect: how much it will cost youCCS moves intervention specialists between schools to ensure every classroom that needs this sort of teacher has one. However, the intervention specialist we spoke with said this is driving even more teachers to quit.
"I cried every single day," the CCS intervention specialist said. "I didn't know what I was doing. I felt like there is a disservice to the students that I now had and I was not capable of filling their needs."
Not only are there not enough teachers, but the number of students in need is quickly growing.
"Our students are coming into kindergarten with skills that are so significantly below their typical peers," Nelson said.
The Ohio Revised Code lays out specific guidelines for how many special-needs students can be with one teacher. Elementary, middle and junior high teachers cannot serve more than 16 children with intellectual disabilities. At the high school level, that number is 24. For children with autism, it's no more than six.
"We are overworked, underpaid," the intervention specialist said.
Downtown’s Sheraton hotel again on the marketSome CCS classrooms are above the legal limit, although the district would not tell NBC4 Investigates how many.
"It has been an issue for the past couple of years where we have had teachers that have had more students on their caseload than what the Ohio Revised Code requires," Nelson said.
Teachers are getting paid more when they have to take on more than the legal caseload.
"This year is the first year we've had a formalized memorandum of understanding with CEA to compensate all teachers with the same formula," Nelson said.
However, the intervention specialist said this wasn't enough.
"I know a lot of us don't go into education for the money, or at least I didn't, so that is not even the issue for me,” the woman said. “It's mostly that our students are not being serviced and they're not being serviced adequately.”
Once the face of Intel, Ohio One project falls second under new CEO’s visionThe district is working with the Ohio Department of Education to find a solution.
"Not only just sharing with them all the things we've done, all the efforts we put forth to prevent this from being a problem but how we will go about systematically designing a process so that on an ongoing basis, we are always looking at the workload calculation," Nelson said.
The intervention specialist said she’s seeing the changes' impact on students.
"My one student, especially, that never had any behaviors, the next week, they are just getting written up and leaving the classroom, disrespecting the teacher and not wanting to come to school anymore," the woman said.
The district has almost 10,000 students with disabilities and plans to ask for an additional 20 intervention specialists for the next school year. CCS is ramping up recruiting, including investing in teacher pipeline programs, in order to hire teachers just out of college.
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