Special Education grant awarded

The Special Education Department recently received a grant from the United States Department of Education that provided more than $550,000 to help create special education teachers for the central Georgia area.

“The grant is a personnel preparation grant funded through the Federal Department of Education. We applied in the Special Education Department and we were one of the few proposals that were funded,” said Dr. Amy Childre, associate professor of the Special Education Department.

Only 75 schools in the nation received funding through this grant.

The grant will support 18 people through a three-year program and is directed at students who have a bachelor’s degree in any area other than education.

“We are attracting people into our programs that are interested in special ed. but may have not known the avenues to get into that profession,” Childre said.

However the students who go through the program don’t just get a free ride. They have to repay their debt to the nation by providing their services, two years to every one-year they were in the program, teaching special education at a school of their choice.

But this is good news for the local school systems.

“I think the greatest benefit is to the local systems,” Childre said. “They never have enough certified teachers to fill the positions they have. So what happens is that they hire people who have an undergraduate degree in another area, people who are not certified in education, to fill these positions and unfortunately a lot of these people fill these positions, but they do not have the training and support to be successful.”

The counties that hope to benefit from the grant are Baldwin, Hancock, Jefferson, Johnson, Laurens, Putnam, Washington and Wilkinson. And the Baldwin County Board of Education is already excited.

“It would be very helpful,” said Traci Kitchens, the special education director for the Baldwin County Board of Education.

She said it would be wonderful to have better qualified teachers and that there is always a shortage of special education teachers everywhere. She also stressed how important it was for the teachers to understand the core curriculum.

And that is the kind of support that Childre wants the program to get.

“What we are hoping to do is support these local school systems, particularly the local areas and counties around us that are underserved and try to provide, through our program, the training and support these teachers need to be successful,” Childre said.

The Baldwin County Board of Education is not the only local organization that is looking forward to the program.

Pat Wolf, director of the Oconee Psycho Educational Program in Baldwin County, is positive her group can gain from the grant as well.

“We can absolutely benefit from it,” Wolf said.

She also said that the grant would have key importance in bringing more qualified special education teachers to the area.

Ultimately, Baldwin and surrounding counties should have special education teachers who can better prepare children for the future within approximately the next three years.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Apr 14 2006. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry