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The city is swapping a plan that would have relocated nearly 100 disabled students to a new building for a plan to disperse the students into special education programs throughout the city.

Under the Department of Education’s original proposal, roughly two-thirds of the students at P.S. 138, a school for severely disabled students, would have moved to share space with the American Sign Language and English Secondary School, a middle and high school that gives admissions preference to deaf students.

That plan was scrapped after P.S. 138 parents and elected officials protested that the new site posed safety risks and that students would not be able to get around the school easily.

Some parents are saying that the department’s new plan is not much better. (more…)

The incremental thaw of a citywide teacher hiring freeze advanced today, when the Department of Education gave nearly all principals the go-ahead to hire new special education teachers.

Principals in districts 9, 19, and 23 must still fill special education positions from the pool of teachers already employed by the city. Those three districts, located in the Bronx and Brooklyn, have either a low number of vacancies or a high number of special education teachers whose positions were eliminated, according to a DOE spokeswoman, Ann Forte. City officials still have not said how many teaching positions were lost to budget cuts at the end of the school year.

Today’s change is the third since the city told principals in early May they would be able to hire only current teachers for new positions or to fill vacancies. Three weeks ago the city started allowing principals of District 75 schools, which serve the city’s most disabled students, to hire new teachers. A week later, school doors opened for most aspiring science teachers. The vast majority of teaching positions remain closed to new teachers.

The change also means that more than half of this year’s Teaching Fellows cohort are now eligible for jobs. Of this year’s Teaching Fellows, 330 are assigned to teach special education. An additional 70 were assigned to District 75, and others were assigned to teach science.

Below the jump is an e-mail sent to new Teaching Fellows today explaining the change. (more…)

New teachers who have wanted to help the city address its severe shortage of science teachers can now be considered for jobs.

Until today, the teachers had been shut out of the system because of a hiring freeze that has limited principals to teachers already working in the city. 

Principals are still limited to current teachers when they hire biology teachers, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Ann Forte. In March, there were 35 biology teachers in the “excess pool,” for teachers already on the system’s payroll, but not hired at a school. The hiring restrictions, in place since early May, were meant to make it more likely for principals to hire teachers in the pool, including those whose positions were lost to budget cuts this spring. The department still has not released information about how many teaching positions were cut this spring.

Last week, the city gave the okay to new teachers whose licenses enable them to teach in District 75, which serves the system’s most disabled students. About 70 Teaching Fellows were affected by that change.

I Teach NYC, the city’s program to attract new teachers, posted about today’s change on Twitter just after 5:30 p.m.

The same day the city announced a total hiring freeze, the Department of Education began lifting one of its own.

Last night, the department e-mailed new Teaching Fellows assigned to District 75, the city’s school district for the most disabled students, to let them know that they can now be hired for open positions in the district. For months, Teaching Fellows and all other teachers not already working in the system have been shut out of consideration for all positions at the department, the result of a cost-saving hiring freeze enacted in early May. 

The change means that about 10 percent of the city’s new Teaching Fellows are now eligible for positions, because about 70 of the 700 fellows currently in training have been assigned to District 75, according to a department spokeswoman, Ann Forte. (Another 330 of the 700 are being trained as special education teachers to work in general education schools, she said.) Previously, those teachers and others not already in the system could be hired only by new schools, and only in small numbers.

Another set of novice teachers so far shut out of most positions, those hired by Teach for America, will not be affected by the change, because TFA does not assign teachers to District 75, Forte said. Paraprofessionals, aides who work with needy students, are still barred from hiring and remain at risk of being laid off, even from District 75 schools, she said. (more…)

I just spent the afternoon at a public hearing about the state’s proposed changes to special needs students’ individualized education plans. I’ll have more to say about the controversial proposal soon, but one thing that surprised me was that the hearing overlapped with parent-teacher conferences for self-contained District 75 programs in New York City. With 23,000 students with special needs enrolled in District 75, I wonder how many parents would have liked to attend the hearing but prioritized meeting with their child’s teacher instead?

Parents and advocates of disabled children who attend schools in District 75, the DOE’s district for children with special needs, are breathing at least a partial sigh of relief this week after a report commissioned by the DOE recommended revamping, but not dismantling, the district. But their anxiety about the district’s future persists as the DOE contemplates which recommendations, if any, to put into action.

The report, released Friday by the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of 66 urban school districts, calls for integrating District 75 better into the rest of the school system and improving the quality of special education instruction in both District 75 and community schools. The report concedes that District 75 is isolated and incoherent as it is currently configured, but it concludes that the expertise contained in District 75 personnel and structures, as well as the support the district receives from its parents and teachers, make it worth retaining. (Read the whole report, hosted online by NYC Public School Parents.) (more…)