“We all have good hearts, and a good skill set, but there are too many kids and not enough of us.”
By Vikii Wenzel | Early Childhood Intervention Specialist
I feel very strongly that every human being’s job while we’re on this earth is to make the world the best place that they can. I became an educator because it seemed that teaching and giving the next generation confidence in themselves and their skills was something I could do relatively well, and that’s how I could contribute to humanity. I got my teaching license in 2004, but before that I was working as a preschool teacher for many years in Japan, Taiwan, and Portland.
In my current position, I do home visits for families who have children between the ages of 0–3 who either already have developmental delays or who have a condition that puts them at risk for delays. I also do visits to local preschool classrooms to meet with kids who are experiencing delays to help make sure their schools can support their needs.
There are just not enough of us. We go to conferences and are told we need to use an autism intervention model that offers each student 20 hours a week of support. I see most of my students for one hour a month. These kids should be getting at least weekly services from me, but there are too many kids and not enough time in the week to see all of them. Our agency offers early childhood special education classrooms students can attend for a total of five hours a week. Children who are typically developing and attending Head Start, for example, are getting 14 hours a week of classroom time. Our students have more needs,but they get less instructional time.
Our huge caseloads are due to the success of the other part of our mandate, which is reaching out to our communities and finding the children who need our services. The problem we run into now is that more people know that we exist, and they’re bringing their children to us for help,and yet we can’t increase our staff size much or increase the number of facilities. We just have to spread everything even thinner.
We aren’t able to bring mental health coordinators into the preschools even though they really need to see what’s happening in the classroom to understand the behavior. We have occupational and physical therapists, but their caseloads are sometimes in the triple digits, and they cover up to five huge, rural counties. They can offer kids physical and occupational therapy once or twice month, even if their doctor recommends more. There is a local hospital that offers those services for kids, but then it’s a matter of getting a medical referral and having the insurance cover it.
People are trying, but everyone is just stretched extremely thin. We all have good hearts and a good skillset, but there are too many kids and not enough of us.
So many of the other problems that our leaders are worried about start in school. School is a child’s first connection with society outside of their family. If that school experience is negligent or insufficient, that’s how they think society feels about them, and they will return that feeling. If we want a healthy society, the first experience needs to be supportive and nurturing. Students need all the academic and emotional tools to become functioning members of society. And because of funding, we’re not fully able to give that to them.
