Special education students still struggling with pandemic’s setbacks

Even now, Melissa Clark wonders whether her daughter Brianna, who has autism, would be better at speaking, learning and socializing if the COVID pandemic hadn’t interrupted her progress.

The West Babylon mother said she saw her 15-year-old daughter’s skills deteriorate during the months of remote and hybrid learning. Brianna couldn’t connect with instruction on her laptop. She couldn’t focus for long periods on a screen. Her in-person speech, life skills therapy and opportunities to socialize fell apart, her mother said.

“She was totally out of sync,” said Clark, adding that even after Brianna returned to school in the fall of 2020, it took her until the end of the school year to settle in and begin catching up. “Our children, they thrive on routine, and the pandemic threw a monkey wrench into that. … She fell behind on things she should have been working on.”

These days, many students with disabilities and in special education are still grappling with setbacks associated with the pandemic, said Dr. Vera  Feuer, associate vice president of Northwell Health’s mental health’s services for schools. Northwell Health, the Island’s largest health care provider, had provided behavioral services to five Island school districts before the pandemic. By 2022, those relationships had grown to 26 districts, and now it’s up to 50 districts, she said. 

“We’re hearing from all the districts that they are seeing a high amount of regression in special education students,” Feuer said. “Maybe it does look like we’re back to normal. The impacts of the pandemic have not gone away. The mental health impact is still heavily present.” 

Learning loss and emotional setbacks can be more severe for special education students versus those in the general population, educators say. When a general education student regresses in school, they might lose some skills with math and English. But when special education students lose ground, some lose life skills that could help them communicate with others and be more independent, they said. 

When the pandemic shut down schools in March 2020, pushing many students into 2½ rocky years of remote and hybrid learning along with vaccine and mask mandates, the disruption set back students across the board. Students in general were already facing mental health challenges, and the pandemic worsened matters. But it hit students with disabilities and special needs that much harder, educators and mental health experts said.

“Since the pandemic, we’ve seen an increase in mental health support and a decrease in academic skills,” said Susan McNulty, assistant to the superintendent for special education curriculum and instruction for Nassau BOCES, which handles many special education students. “We’re not out from behind the eight ball. We’re continuously working to close the gaps in learning and mental health.”

Still, educators see progress.

“Our students have done a lot of great work,” said Bridget Karis, West Hempstead’s executive director of pupil personnel services, regarding special education students. “Over the last four years, we’ve really seen them springboard ahead. … The last year or two, we’ve moved forward from focusing on the pandemic.”

These students have benefited greatly from the increased funding and resources for mental health that followed the pandemic, she said. Schools have been able to increase staffing and services. West Hempstead is among the districts working with Northwell Health on these services.

State lawmakers have focused on the youth mental health crisis. Gov. Kathy Hochul has said $20 million will be spent for schools statewide. The money will help open mental health clinics, making it easier for students and their families to access clinical services. To date, more than 1,100 school-based mental health clinic satellites are either operating or under development, state officials said.

Difficulties in assessing progress

Long Island has 65,064 students with disabilities, who account for 15.7% of its 414,094 students, according to the state Department of Education. Statewide, there were 456,385 students with disabilities, 18.8% of the 2.4 million total K-12 students for 2022-23, the agency said.

When most students came back to schools in September 2020, educators said they saw serious behavioral and academic issues among many of special needs students. They had trouble maintaining eye contact with others, some couldn’t sit still in class, high-schoolers were behaving like middle-schoolers, and some developed negative behaviors, educators said. 

Brianna Clark started elbowing her instructor when her patience ran thin, her mother said. She made little progress academically that year. 

Judging how well these students are rebounding is challenging, experts said.

Students in special education and those with disabilities have a wide range of diagnosis, from autism to medical problems, deafness to developmental delays, learning disabilities to mental health issues, they said. Moreover, students in these categories often progress in very individual ways, at their own speed, educators said.

School officials are still seeing signs that concern them, Karis said. Before the pandemic, the West Hempstead district would see about 10 referrals every three months to assess whether students needed special education; now she sees about 30, she said.

Even before the pandemic, standardized test scores for students with disabilities were substantially lower than those of nondisabled students. Scores for students with disabilities dropped by an average of 8 points in math between 2020 and 2022, compared to 7 points for nondisabled students, according to the Center for Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. Students with disabilities dropped by an average of 7 points in reading, compared to 5 points for nondisabled students, the group said.

The return to school prompted a slew of new assessments, revised service plans and team meetings with special education families, said Veronica Garcia, director of development for the Nassau-Suffolk Autism Society of America.

“Some kids wouldn’t sit in a circle. That ability went away,” she said. “We had to go back to having them sit for one minute, then two minutes, than four minutes.”

She added, “Parents were super-sad, having watched their child’s progress slip away.”

A dire need for teachers

Brianna Clark is mostly nonverbal, meaning that her family can understand her speech but many others can’t, her mother said. She often uses her iPad to spell out what she wants to say. She’s good at following instruction, but coming back into a classroom setting at James E. Allen Junior-Senior High School in Dix Hills was rough, her mother said.

Many programs saw high vacancies, educators said.

Programs for special needs students are in dire need of certified special education teachers, said Stephen Hernandez, a Hofstra associate professor who instructs future special education teachers.

“It’s not unusual for my special education students to receive job offers before they graduate — and they get them on Long Island,” Hernandez said of the teachers.

Hernandez said he was especially concerned for preschoolers who, because of the pandemic shutdowns and quarantines, might not have learned to relate to other children their age.

“They might have difficulty sharing toys and expressing themselves to others,” he said. “They might grab a toy out of another child’s hands and raise their voice.”

Karis, of the West Hempstead district, said the district has seen a sharp increase in preschool referrals to evaluate whether a child needs special education. Since last July, the district has seen 75 such referrals. Prior to the pandemic, they saw about 25 in that time period, she said.

“Whether or not that is directly tied to the pandemic, I can’t say,” she said.

The pandemic compounded existing challenges to providing speech, physical and other therapists for preschoolers. Earlier this year, dozens of providers spotlighted the issue through testimony before the Nassau County Legislature. They described a financial and moral crisis in which they were unable to recruit and retain therapists because the payment rates were low.

Close to 200 children went without the federally mandated services and were put on a waiting list, some for as long as a year, they said.

In April, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman announced plans to increase the county reimbursement rates from $40 to $50 per half-hour for these providers, which would mark the first increase in 25 years. The county Board of Health is expected to approve the increase this month, officials said.

Special education students historically have higher rates of school discipline, noted Eilleen Buckley, executive director of the Long Island Advocacy Center, a nonprofit that works with families struggling with school suspensions and the special education process of obtaining services.

“We’re seeing a huge increase in suspensions, with schools looking to suspend students longer,” Buckley said. “Under the law, these students cannot be suspended for behavior that is a manifestation of a student’s disability. … There are times when the school finds the behavior is not a manifestation of their disability. It’s a gray area.” 

The great majority of Long Island special education students attend local public schools and are educated for some part of the day alongside their general education peers in classrooms, according to the state Comptroller’s Office.

Chronic absenteeism has significantly increased in Island schools since the pandemic, including among students with disabilities. Students with disabilities are registering higher rates than those of the general population, according to state public school data analyzed by Newsday. A student is considered chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of the instructional days.

Even as COVID has receded, attendance has not bounced back in many schools. 

For the Island’s general school population, the rate of chronic absenteeism has almost doubled 2018-19, from 11% in the 2018-19 school year to 19% in 2022-23, according to the data.

For students with disabilities, the rate of chronic absenteeism jumped from 15% to 24% in those years, the data said.

Overall, students with disabilities represent about 20% of all the students who were chronically absent, both before and after the pandemic, state figures showed. Some Island districts, however, saw greater percentages. 

In the Hauppauge school district, a total of 142 of the 453 chronically absent students were those with disabilities, almost a third, according to data from the state Department of Education.

“This is an important topic to us as we believe that students need to be in school in order to thrive academically, socially and emotionally,” said Superintendent Donald Murphy. He noted that the Hauppauge district formed a Chronic Absentee Committee to identify root causes and address the issue.

“We have added targeted programs and hired additional staff members to support our students,” he said. “Also, we have partnered with Northwell Health to provide parents with resources and support to help with students dealing with school avoidance, anxiety and depression.”

Lost: A sense of fitting in

John Kilduff is 20 and has Down syndrome. He’s outgoing and very verbal, though has limited reading ability, said his father, Jim Kilduff. When the pandemic sent the educational world into remote learning, the Rockville Centre resident was a popular student at Southside High School, taking special ed classes while mixing in with the general population at lunchtime, recess and other activities.

“He had a sense of fitting in. We lost that with the pandemic,” Jim Kilduff said.

The Kilduff family helped him get through remote instruction, taking turns monitoring and assisting him, his father said. Southside officials, seeing the difficulty of distance learning for special ed students, brought them back early, in June 2020, he said.

“Academically, the fact that he got back into school so quickly, I don’t think he lost significant ground,” said his father. And being around other students helped ease John’s sense of isolation, he added. “He just got through it, like the rest of us.”

Angelo Zegarelli is the superintendent of the Henry Viscardi School in Albertson. The school specializes in providing education to children with severe physical disabilities and who often require life-sustaining medical treatment throughout the day.

“Early on we saw some regression. I feel we combated that pretty nicely,” said Zegarelli of the school that serves 160 students.

This academic year, the school hired a specialist in social and emotional learning, he said. During the pandemic the school created a special wellness team to address the regression among students, he said. 

“We saw students not making eye contact, not saying hello, showing trouble with conflict resolution,” he said. Many of the students are medically fragile, which made them nervous. “We saw students showing an anxiety and fear of COVID. They feared that they could get sick.”

The students’ disabilities often played havoc with pandemic restrictions on social distancing and mask-wearing, he said. Many couldn’t wear a mask because they need to be continually monitored for choking on their saliva. 

“I think our students are where they should be, pretty close to where they were” before the pandemic, he said.

‘We have to catch up’

Melissa Clark has dreams for her daughter.

“I’d love for her to be independent, to be able to have a job and go to the store, shop herself. Simple things that are really hard,” she said.

For now, Brianna is learning and practicing assembling products into containers and packages.

Her mother hopes Brianna develops the skills she’ll need to work. 

“We’re just behind, a little further behind. … We have to catch up,” she said.

With Michael Ebert and Arielle Martinez