Ryan Scallon is superintendent of Portland Public Schools. He can be reached at superintendent@portlandschools.org.

How will the Portland Public Schools’ new five-year strategic plan impact students in the classroom? That’s a question I will be exploring in my column over the next few months. This month I’m focusing on our special education programming.

The five priorities of our strategic plan are: achievement, whole student, people and systems – with equity at the center. Each priority has strategic initiatives to help us achieve the outcomes we want to see. There are too many initiatives to do all at once, so we’re starting this school year and sequencing the others over the next four years.

The special education initiative under our achievement priority calls for us to “develop the capacity of schools to provide more effective instruction to students with disabilities across the continuum of services.” This school year, our goal is to design a better and more sustainable model to ensure that we’re able to appropriately meet the learning and support needs of all students.

PPS has engaged a partner, the District Management Group, to assess and develop recommendations for changes to our special education model. We’ll use focus groups and interviews to get essential feedback from staff and families to aid in this work. The resulting recommendations likely will require several years to implement, but we’re taking some immediate steps this school year.

One important move we have made is to add special education coordinators at each school. These are teacher leaders who facilitate special education processes and programming directly at the school level. Our goal is to ensure that school teams have immediate access to timely support that is embedded directly in their school communities.

In addition, 48 of our teachers recently received 30 hours of training in Orton-Gillingham, an evidence-based approach to reading intervention. This method benefits all students, but is particularly beneficial for students with reading disabilities.

Teachers will also use a new assessment tool called mClass DIBELS in Grades 2-5 to assess foundational reading skills and monitor student progress. Teachers make decisions about instruction using the data for each student.

One immediate challenge we’re facing is that we have more students who need the services of specialized programs within the Portland Public Schools or of special purpose private schools than we have seats available. There currently are 10 students awaiting internal placements and 12 students awaiting out-of-district placements. These students are currently being served in their home school or program.

Next year, our priority is to begin increasing our capacity to serve students with this level of need, as we rethink the most effective way to meet all students’ needs. We expect our redesign and expansion efforts to play out over several years.

Another major challenge is a severe shortage of special education staff. The U.S. Department of Education reports that 80% of states, including Maine, have a shortage of special education teachers and 78% of schools report difficulty in hiring education staff. The Portland Public Schools is not immune from this tight labor market. We face special education staffing challenges that will require us to be creative and not only address short-term staffing, but engage partners in long-term planning.

To fill vacancies, we’re working to expand our pipeline of qualified candidates through relationships with regional colleges and universities and also advertising through various channels. Also, our new three-year contract with our educational technicians significantly increases pay, making us more competitive when it comes to hiring and retaining ed techs.

These significant challenges do not have easy answers and require multiple approaches, but we must resolve them to support the achievement of all students.