GROW Your Special Education Harvest

Ryan Preis, Ed.D., is an educator of 23 years. He currently serves as the principal of Covington Elementary in Kent School District.

Times are lean in public education. Money is scarce and needs are increasing. In special education times are even leaner. Why? Difficult behaviors, demanding compliance deadlines, increasing tort liability, and shortfalls in budgets and staffing are persistent realities. Moreso, special education teacher (SET) attrition is large. Findings in 2019 from Sutcher et al. in The Education Policy Archives noted that SET attrition rates are significantly higher than general education teachers. Even higher attrition occurs, as noted in the same year by Billingsley and Bettini in the Review of Educational Research, amongst staff serving high behavior students or in Title 1 schools. Simply put, SET burnout is real. Existing SETs will stay if the conditions are right, and new ones have options—they can shop. This makes school administrator oversight even more critical. If you manage and support well, your program will survive and produce. Administrate poorly and your staff will die on the vine. In this reality, where can savvy school administrators learn to more effectively support and oversee their staff? In steps the farmer.

A farmer? Yes. We can learn much from individuals accustomed to weathering unfavorable conditions, tight finances, and challenging work. Their no-gimmicks, practical, and proven techniques grow our daily food supply. Farmers don’t wish for food to grow—they work for it. They sweat for it. Through cultivation and attention to conditions they reap a good harvest. Cultivation and care lead to success whereas inattentiveness brings crop failure. Success requires both cultivation and attention. The same is true in managing special education programs and SETs. School administrators must cultivate the soil—SETs—while attending to current conditions if they want to produce student success. Till the soil well and reap a harvest. Neglect your people or the conditions and students will fail. This process is straightforward but frequently messed up. Why? Too much focus on the harvest while neglecting SETs.

School leaders, how skilled a farmer are you? If you feel there is room for improvement, I have good news: by following the acronym “GROW” you can improve your situation. Check it out below. Your harvest depends on it!

G = Get Dirty

You can often spot a good farmer by the soil on their clothes. Similarly, SETs plow through tough days, break ground during arduous processes, wrangle unruly student behaviors, and weather unique stresses. They endure long hours. The conditions are tough and not for the fainthearted. They also know whether the school administrator is working alongside or watching from afar. In demanding conditions, smart farmers work to save their crops. Smart administrators do as well. No staff, no harvest. To help SETs and simultaneously garner respect, roll up your sleeves and get dirty. One SET asks, ‘Do you know the names of my students?” Sit at the group table and coach a student through their work. When behavior goes awry, you step in and practice calming strategies with the student. Help write a student’s Functional Behavior Analysis and resulting behavior plan. When a para is absent with no sub, step in and provide room support. Plan advocacy meetings on behalf of your SET and parch your throat voicing their IEP frustrations to inattentive district personnel or processes. SETs with admin who get dirty in the work say, “I know you have my back.” When that happens, staff will give you three things: their respect, their willingness to stick around, and their time when you engage in the second step of GROW.

R = Real Listening

On a still, quiet day, farmers can nearly hear the corn grow—but only if they stop to listen. How often are you talking versus listening to your SETs? Pay attention to the needs of your SETs with regular, planned meetings solely designed to listen to them with intentional questions about real and perceived needs. Real listening puts away your agenda, timelines, compliance needs, and hurried schedule to support your staff as people. Hear the poignant words of a SET: “I can tell when admin are actually listening. I know when it’s fake. I can feel it. But you listen.” Just as you want to be heard, so do they. Steal this practice: schedule rotating monthly meetings with individual SETs solely designed to hear their needs, concerns, and items important to them. Let them set the agenda. Remember too that SET burnout is real and the stakes are high. Be quick to listen and slow to speak. Cultivate a culture where you SETs truly see you are listening.

O = Offer

Farmers offer experience and expertise to the next generation. Why reinvent the wheel? School administrators have experience and expertise too on a topic absent in SET training programs: how to manage other adults. SET training programs don’t focus on this need despite how frequently SETs manage paraeducators, behavior technicians, nursing aids, certified behavior personnel, and others depending on students’ needs. Managing adults is uniquely difficult compared to managing students and contributes to teacher burnout. Competent school administrators know how to manage adults and can support their staff with strategies, practical insights, and how-to. Plus, the cost is minimal since expertise is already on-site. Admin can tailor offerings to the situation with planned individual coaching, group professional development, or book studies. Make use of Blanchard and Johnson’s classic, The One Minute Manager or Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when the Stakes are High by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler. These are adaptable to many needs. Offering your time and expertise communicates that you value SETs. It also communicates a tangible step towards the last letter of GROW.

W = Work

Hard-working farmers know their success when the harvest comes in. The proof is in the results. Both what you work for and how you work matter. Average administrators work to harvest student results. Great administrators work to harvest student and staff results. Your staff may not be able to articulate the differences between Douglas McGregor’s famous theory X and theory Y of management, but they know whether you treat them as a means to an end. One self-contained teacher states, “There are plenty of people paying attention to students, but not adults. We get the vibe that students matter and adults don’t. If we don’t matter, how do we be there fully for kids?” School administrators unfamiliar with McGregor’s theories of human motivation and resulting managerial styles endanger their school culture and risk SET attrition when policies, goals, and habits fail to consider the SETs themselves as inherently part of success. In special education, success is only real when both students and SETs win.

Hey school leader, want a better special education harvest? It’s time to GROW.