When she has to miss work, Kara Blevins, a special education classroom aide in Kanawha County, worries about Andrew Bungard. Bungard, 16, is mostly nonverbal and has cerebral palsy; Blevins’ job is to make sure he’s safe, able to eat, get around and learn.
“I just get nervous because I’m like ‘who’s going to be there to take care of him?’” she said.
Because West Virginia schools are facing severe special education staff shortages, there are no substitute aides to fill in when she’s gone. And across the state, full-time special education teachers and aides are in short supply.
Last year, lawmakers passed a bill to hire teachers’ aides in kindergarten through third grade classrooms to help with literacy and math skills. But many special education aides left for these newly-created positions, making it more difficult for students with disabilities to get the education they need.
With a little more than two weeks left in the session, lawmakers on the House Education Committee advanced a bill on Wednesday to grant 10% pay raises to special education teachers and 5% increases to aides. The bill now goes to the Finance Committee.
Multiple lawmakers spoke passionately in favor. Del. Elliott Pritt, R-Fayette, the bill’s lead sponsor, and Del. Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, said they’d “inadvertently” worsened the shortage of special education aides last year.
But advocates have said they warned lawmakers the shortage would occur.
“We have autism rooms in Fayette County that have no teacher, no long-term sub will take the job and no day-to-day sub will take the job so these classrooms have no teachers,” Pritt, a public school teacher, said. “So school staff or the counselors are having to rotate in and out of these rooms every day.”
In the state Senate, Sen. Amy Grady, R-Mason, chair of the Education Committee, has introduced a similar pay raise bill but so far hasn’t put it on her committee’s agenda for consideration.
Grady told MetroNews this week that she didn’t want to create “false hope” by putting the bill on the agenda because it might not pass the Finance Committee.
On Wednesday, parents of children with disabilities came to the Capitol building to speak with lawmakers about the importance of pay raises for the aides who work with their kids each school day.
Della Bastress, who is nine years old and has nonverbal autism, needs a classroom aide to help her eat, go to the bathroom and use a communication device, said her mother Blaire Malkin. And in the last year and a half, Della has had four different aides.
“And the woman who’s with her now is absolutely wonderful, and loves my daughter,” said Malkin, of South Charleston. “But we can’t expect people to keep taking these jobs just out of love.”
She noted a teacher assigned to a classroom of kids with autism might have to create different curricula for every student. She hopes a pay raise would make it more likely for special education aides and teachers to stay in the challenging positions.
“Being able to know who’s going to be there each morning is super important, especially to the kid who’s not speaking and can tell me how she feels each day,” she said.
Correction, Feb. 21, 2024: This story originally misstated the last name of Della Bastress and misspelled the first name of Blaire Malkin.