Special education services have the unique task of providing an individualized education program for students with learning disabilities, but now they are doing so amid the COVID-19 pandemic that has complicated an already difficult job.
In early March, the coronavirus pandemic forced schools to close and students and teachers were introduced to the new world of virtual learning.
Kristina Medina, 34, a Quinnipiac University adjunct professor and Cheshire, Connecticut, resident, said her 6-year-old son, Dylan, enjoyed online schooling at first, but that changed after two weeks when Dylan realized his world had been disrupted. As the term deepened, Dylan’s education degraded to Google Meet video conferencing calls with teachers with a handful of daily assignments.
Dylan performed well at academic subjects, the school staff reported. But something felt wrong. Medina said the absence of social interaction left Dylan flailing, accomplishing little outside of schoolwork.
“All he wanted to do was play video games all day,” Medina said. “It’s really hard as a parent to be like alright, well you can’t do anything that you enjoy doing — so you can’t use your tablet today. So unfortunately due to the pandemic, his screen time has gone way up.”
Dylan’s experience is not unusual for students with learning disabilities. According to the Connecticut State Department of Education the state has 527,829 public school students. About 73,900 of those students require special education serices, which is up from about 68,700 four years ago. Locally, 13% of students in Cheshire’s public schools and 18% of Hamden’s students are special ed.
Many of those students are struggling as COVID-19 continues to disrupt the structured learning framework required to keep education in balance with social interactions. School districts in Cheshire and elsewhere are adapting but problems remain.
Remote learning is based on lessons presented over video conferencing applications such as Zoom that provide live feeds from the teacher to the student. Interactive activities can be conducted over Zoom and other similar applications such as Google Meet or Microsoft Teams. Screens can be shared and chat function enables text communication. Still, for students, teachers and parents, there is a learning curve in adapting to that environment.
Moira Aitro, a speech pathologist at Darcey School in Cheshire, said she formed a transdisciplinary team approach where herself, an occupational therapist, and a special education teacher would go on Google Meet and start working with the child with their parent there. The approach called for targeting the parent as well as the student for lessons.
“A lot of our therapy involved coaching the parent,” Aitro said. “When I say coaching I don’t say it in the sense of telling them what to do, but coaching, reflective questioning is what we do.”
That means Aitro or a colleague would ask the parent about the lesson and whether the child learned something from it. They would then collaborate on how to build on the lesson with at-home activities to build off the initial lesson. Is it helping their child? Then they will brainstorm activities that the child can do at home to build off of what’s happening at (virtual) school.
Aitro said she saw online learning help the family dynamic. Many parents realized that they confronted new challenges because their child’s behavior common at school did not happen at home before.
“They embraced what we were telling them to do with their child and they made connections with their children on a different level,” Aitro said.
The pandemic’s erasure of social interaction turned out to be the biggest loss in virtual learning, Aitro said. The loss of structure and predictability led to issues that forced parents to address without knowing exactly how to do that.
Susan Landisio, a professor of special education at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, and a teacher in Cheshire public schools, said young special ed students thrive on schedules, routines, familiarity, hands-on instruction and they’re motivated by their peers.
“Although not being in school significantly impacted all students, it was the students who are on the Autism spectrum who had the most difficult time with remote learning,” Landisio said in an email interview. “The essential structure of a school setting provided for these students was gone. Our challenge (including classroom teachers, therapists and paraprofessionals) was to bring structure, routine and experiential learning to their remote instruction.”
Landisio and her colleague’s attempt to do that was by consulting and working with parents to become partners in teaching their children. However, social issues persisted.
Once COVID restrictions eased up in the summer months, Medina said Dylan started going on playdates but he struggled. The world, once normal in the rhythm of predictability, suddenly became terrifying.
During the summer, Medina and her husband Michael debated whether Dylan would return to school. They decided he would not and become a full-time virtual learner instead. But Dylan’s behavior – he refused to interact with other students at a socially distanced birthday party – changed their minds.
“That was when a lightbulb went off,” Medina said. “He needs to be in school. Being on a computer is not going to help him and he’s going to continue to regress. Because the last birthday party he was at before COVID had hit, he was talking to everybody, running around, he was completely fine.”
Medina isn’t the only special needs parent who agrees that a virtual education isn’t on-par with in-person instruction. Kirstin Dubrosky O’Gorman, a parent of two special needs children from Fairfield, Connecticut, said she feels special needs students were left to fend for themselves.
“Many parents and kids left adrift in the lost world of Google classroom, with demands to navigate the Chrome book and other tech with no formal experience,” O’Gorman said. “Reading is not the same on a screen and teaching is not nearly effective. Related services need to be delivered in the LRE and Zoom cannot possibly be compared to in-person services.”
But some have found success with special needs children using virtual interaction. KidSense Therapy Group in Milford, Connecticut, conducts speech, physical and occupational therapy and mental health counseling for multi-disabled kids.
Kaitlin Castiglione, 32, a speech-language pathologist at KidSense from Orange, Connecticut, said she and her colleagues never tried teletherapy before the pandemic. But much like Aitro and Landisio, Catiglione said parental involvement would be crucial to making it work.
“Here we are going to start this journey on teletherapy and be on the computer and we can’t physically touch the kids and help them through challenging moments,” Castiglione said.
Castiglione started with activities like showing cards or reading a book through Zoom, but as time went on she started to use more interactive tools through the technology. Some students struggled on the computer, but Castiglione gave parents learning materials to support therapy.
Even while absorbing setbacks, Castoglione said the positives triumphed over the negatives of the approach.
“Some of my kiddos who I thought wouldn’t enjoy (teletherapy) as much, enjoy it even more and sometimes I see them twice a week,” Castiglione said. “It’s definitely been a huge switch for us but I think it’s opened a lot of doors.”
Cheshire resident Jennifer Kubicza, 37, decided to have her 10-year-old son, Cole, who has Angelman’s syndrome, go fully remote this fall. She said it worked because in-person classes triggered behavioral issues.
“If he didn’t want to do something he would drop to the ground, kick,” Kubicza said. “He wasn’t very cooperative, so we had a lot of struggles with school and we were getting phone calls that he had to be restrained.”
The district considered an outplacement school for Cole, Kubicza said. But when the family tested positive for COVID-19 and didn’t recover for several months, Cole did not finish the school year.
Since Cole started school this year, Kubicza said her son has made developments in his education due to the fact his at-school behavioral issues aren’t happening since he’s learning remotely. She said he can sit down for 30 minutes at a time on Zoom. Kubicza cites how in music class, Cole was able to do an assignment where he had to write a rap song, which she said he wouldn’t have been able to do in the classroom.
Even with Cole’s success virtually learning, Kubicza said her son will eventually get back in the classroom and hope it’s a better experience than before the pandemic. One element she doesn’t like about virtual learning is the lack of hands-on therapy, a task she now has to do. But that is stressful and requires resources that may not be available.
“I honestly can’t live my life like this,” Kubicza said. “Because I work in the morning and then I teach (Cole) all afternoon, make dinner, get him ready for bed, and then I go back to work until midnight and I can’t live my life without any time to do any housework and that’s the real big downside.”