Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies

Change in co-teaching policy may hurt

The state Education Department's move could cost the county millions of dollars, and some educators fear it will disrupt efforts to help disabled students.

The state may penalize Pasco County for its widespread practice of placing disabled students in mainstream classes taught by two teachers.

A new statewide policy bars school districts from figuring co-teaching into their class-size ratio calculations.

The rule change could cost Pasco County millions of dollars. Local educators fear it will hurt their efforts to include disabled students in classes with their nondisabled peers. Such mainstreaming is thought to help disabled students improve academically and socially at higher rates than if they were segregated into special classes.

Now mainstreaming is butting heads with the state's class-size reduction law.

For years, a class of 30 students taught by two teachers has been considered to have a 15-to-1 student-teacher ratio. Now the state Education Department is saying that won't do. Schools must show they are meeting state-mandated class-size averages without factoring in co-teaching.

Pasco educators blasted the new state Board of Education policy as "outrageous" and "bad for kids" and said it was part of the Jeb Bush administration's effort to undo the controversial voter-approved class-size reduction amendment.

Pasco leads the state in co-teaching classrooms, according to state data. Principals use the method almost exclusively to pair special-education teachers with general education teachers to help disabled students. More than 900 teachers co-teach across the district, an official said.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's the perfect example of bureaucrats making decisions about things they know nothing about," said Peter Kennedy, director of exceptional student education for the district. Kennedy sent an e-mail to a state Education Department official asking sarcastically whether the state plans to return federal funds designed to help disabled students.

Kennedy said that 60 percent of the district's 12,800 exceptional students are served in mainstream classrooms, compared with 55 percent statewide.

Even the Education Department conceded co-teaching has its merits. In a memo sent to all superintendents Wednesday, assistant deputy commissioner Linda Champion wrote: "While co-teaching may be a valuable strategy for delivering instruction, it is not an acceptable approach to meet the requirements of the class-size amendment."

Kennedy and assistant superintendent Bob Dorn indicated they were unwilling to abandon co-teaching as a means of educating disabled kids for fear of falling out of compliance with federal rules that encourage mainstreaming.

Meeting the state directive and Pasco's current level of co-teaching could mean hiring as many as 1,800 more teachers, Dorn said. And that's to say nothing of the cost of building more classrooms.

Kennedy accused state officials of assuming districts use co-teaching to dodge class-size mandates. Noting that co-teaching predates the class-size amendment, Kennedy called those assumptions ignorant and stupid.

"Anyone who thinks that's why we do co-teaching needs to walk out of their offices and into a school," he said. "It will be used whether it's class-size reduction or not."

The state's class-size reduction law has been at the center of a political wrestling match for years. Voters approved mandating the reduction in 2002, despite protests of Gov. Bush, who lamented the movement as a costly initiative that would eat into other areas of the educational budget.

Critics say the Board of Education's most recent policy is another effort to make the class-size law even more painful and more ripe for repeal.

Education Department officials offered no clarification on the policy's potential impact on Pasco. They gave little response to the criticism levied against the Board of Education for the policy change.

"The state board supports co-teaching as a teaching strategy," spokeswoman Melanie Etters wrote in an e-mail reply. "However, the decision was made following discussion with legal counsel who reviewed the constitutional amendment and found that the language does not allow any flexibility in the class-size calculation."