According to the Rhode Island Department of Education, special needs students in Rhode Island who can’t attend school for medical reasons are supposed to receive at least five hours of academic instruction a week. But some parents have been forced to pull their kids out of school because they say local districts aren’t living up to that requirement.
In a recent story, Boston Globe reporter Steph Machado detailed the extent of the problem and explored possible solutions. She joined Ocean State Media morning host Luis Hernandez to discuss her findings.
Interview highlights
On how she began exploring the challenges facing homebound students with special needs in Rhode Island
Steph Machado: I’ve been covering education in Rhode Island for a while, and particularly issues with special education because these are some of our most vulnerable children. So I got a phone call from State Senator Lou DePalma, who obviously was aware of some of my previous coverage, and he let me know about this issue with homebound students, which I hadn’t looked into before. These are students who cannot go to school in person for weeks or months because they have a medical problem; maybe they have cancer, maybe they’re immunocompromised. According to the families who I interviewed for this story, they’re not getting the homebound instruction in full that they’re supposed to be getting from their school districts. And so this is just yet another way our system is failing to fully and properly educate special education students. It’s not unique to Rhode Island. It’s not even unique to these school districts that were mentioned in my story. But we’re continuing, as a state, to struggle to properly serve some of our most vulnerable children.
On how many homebound students with special needs there are in Rhode Island
Machado: (For) this past school year that just ended, the Rhode Island Department of Education told me there were 162 students officially enrolled in what’s called homebound or hospital instruction, and 34 of those were special education students. However, a special ed advocate, Deanna Conley, who I spoke to for this story, believes those numbers are undercounted. She and Senator DePalma had put out a survey looking for families whose kids could not go to school for medical reasons, and they found when they did this survey, a bunch of families basically just had to pull their kids out of school because they weren’t getting the services that they needed, and they are now “homeschooling” them, but they don’t want to homeschool them. They don’t feel qualified to homeschool their children. They want certified teachers teaching their children, but they just felt so lost. Their kids were missing so much school. They were afraid of truancy. Dr. Conley calls them reluctant homeschoolers.
On why Rhode Island school districts struggle to provide instruction for homebound students with special needs
Machado: What I found, and what Dr. Conley found too when she surveyed parents, is that the districts were really having trouble fulfilling this minimum of five hours. (For) one of the parents in the story, the district found a retired teacher who’s coming all the way from, I think, North Providence to Tiverton. She comes two days a week for an hour, so that’s only two hours a week. Plus, the district also has to provide other services for special needs students that are in their IEPs (Individualized Education Program) – physical therapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy – and those people have to go to the child’s home because they’re not able to come to school. So it is difficult. If it’s already hard to find special educators or service providers, now you need to find one that’s available five days a week for one hour and maybe only for a few weeks or a few months, because the goal is always for the child to come back to school if they’re well enough.
On how the state can improve education for homebound students with special needs
Machado: Dr. Conley is a longtime special ed teacher and now advocate. She is trying to see if the state can create some kind of statewide program that hires teachers permanently so they can be dispatched to all of these students’ homes so that it’s not disparate and spread out where every district has to figure it out on their own.
This program that they’re trying to come up with, they’ve actually talked to other states – I believe it was Maryland and Virginia – where there are similar, sort of, centralized hubs for homebound students. They’re at the early stages of trying to create the program. Obviously, it would need money. Every problem we have in education, there’s some kind of solution that could be fixed with more money. They would have to propose this next year at the next legislative session. Senator DePalma is the finance chairman in the Senate, so he’s certainly in a position to push for funding for this. But like anything, it’s competing with every other priority in education and elsewhere, and we’ve had tight budgets lately. I’m sure the school districts would be thrilled if the state was going to take this over. They wouldn’t have to deal with funding and providing these services, but it would require the state to decide that they were willing to fund it.
