The Pandemic Is a Crisis for Students With Special Needs
Some students rely on schools for the personal, hands-on attention of specialists. What do they do now?
Editor’s Note: This story is the 15th in our series “On Teaching,” which aims to collect the wisdom and knowledge of veteran educators. As the coronavirus pandemic has forced the majority of American students to learn at home or remotely, we’re asking some of the country’s most experienced and accomplished teachers to share their advice and identify their students’ most urgent needs.Lauren Kahn is used to spending her whole day on the floor. She works at the Queens Center for Progress, teaching nonverbal 3- and 4-year-olds with intellectual disabilities and autism spectrum disorder, several of whom have visual impairments as well. The class is hands-on, to say the least—they sing, they play, they practice communicating with body language. Well, they used to.
Instructing her students is an impossible task from afar, so Kahn is trying to teach their parents to teach. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, she FaceTimes the parents so that they can put on their children, and on Tuesdays she sends out an email newsletter with exercises for the whole week. The theme of the month is plants; one week, she asked the parents to help their children sort vegetables by color, to see if they can point to the red ones or combine the orange ones.
But the parents aren’t teachers. They have their own jobs to worry about—or worse, are unemployed—and other children to tend to. Much of the time, the parents don’t pick up Kahn’s call, and she’s left to wonder how her students are doing. Sometimes, when she says she’ll call back, she’s told not to bother. She understands—it’s hard on everyone, especially low-income families such as those she typically serves. “They’re burnt out,” she told me. So is she. Kahn tries to sing songs to her students over FaceTime so that she can see how they’re responding, but it’s hard to tell whether they even know she’s there; if she gets a smile, it’s a win so big it’ll have to carry her for days.
For students with special needs—roughly 7 million in the U.S. ages 3 to 21—the coronavirus pandemic, and its attendant school closures, can be especially scary. At school, they get individualized attention from professionals who are trained in, and deeply familiar with, their unique ways of thinking, perceiving, and processing. But no amount of love and care at home can turn the average parent into a special-education teacher overnight. Nor can it enable them to practice occupational, speech, or physical therapy—services that are provided in many schools, but aren’t always covered by insurance and can therefore be otherwise out of reach. “A lot of students have had one-on-one professionals with them in the classroom, along with general-education and special-education teachers supporting them,” Elizabeth Barker, an accessibility researcher with the Northwest Evaluation Association, told me. “Now we’re asking parents to step into all of these roles.”
For many special-education students, the tools that other children are using to make remote education possible—online platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, printed work packets—just aren’t accessible. Students with disabilities often use assistive technology; for instance, a student with visual impairments might use a screen reader to read aloud the text on a computer screen, or a braille reader to read the text themselves. But a lot of online platforms aren’t compatible with assistive technology—and even CONTINUE READING: Special Education Goes Remote in the COVID-19 Pandemic - The Atlantic