Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com 

Long before Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) establishing special education in public schools, there were gifted teachers who recognized how to help struggling students learn. 

I was one of those students.

My early elementary teachers believed in oral reading for fluency. I could see the lips of my fellow “slow readers” silently counting the number of paragraphs to find which one they’d be reading out loud. They silently practiced sounding out each word. That didn’t work for me. I was also a slow math student and often miscounted which paragraph was mine.

When it was my turn, there was no fluency—only sweating. I can still hear my teacher quietly encouraging me to “sound it out.” The only sounding-out was my heart pounding.

Later in elementary school, we were assigned small reading groups with sweet names like Butterflies, Fawns, and Hummingbirds. One glance around the circle of Fawns confirmed I was with the “slow readers.” We all knew.

By seventh grade, remedial reading became available. It was a pull-out program where a student worked one on one with a reading teacher. The new remedial reading teacher was my old kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Cue. 

I loved Mrs. Cue as a kindergartner, but I was a seventh-grader with a hint of a mustache. I’d rather chew my own arm off than be singled out for special reading with a kindergarten teacher. I didn’t have a chip on my shoulder; it was a boulder. I was wrong.

Mrs. Cue miraculously channeled what seventh-grade boys wanted to read. She introduced me to the Hardy Boys. Frank and Joe Hardy became my friends, and Mrs. Cue and my two new friends slowly taught me to read and to love it.

I don’t know if I was a special education student, I just know that without a teacher understanding I needed a different approach to reading, I’d have been a student at risk and never would have become an English/reading teacher.

The IDEA is 51 years old and has been reauthorized five times with bipartisan support from Congress. Now the Trump administration has a plan to move special education oversight from the U.S. Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy believes special education should be treated under a medical model. If you’ve ever been trapped in the medical model, you know how dangerous this move will be for special education students.

Thankfully, my teachers didn’t treat me as sick. Instead, they treated me as a work in progress needing different education methods. But special education is far from perfect, and some changes are needed.

First, special education has never been fully funded. Under the IDEA, the federal government is committed to funding 40 percent of the average per pupil cost. Congress really only covers 10 percent and forces states to cover the remainder. They don’t. Currently there’s a nationwide shortfall of $38.6 billion.

Second, the burn-out rate for special education teachers is high, and it’s not always caused by the intensity of challenging students. Special education teachers drown in paperwork and meetings. Paperwork needs to be simplified, and teachers need more time during the day to write Individual Learning Plans (IEPs) and to meet with parents.

Third, there’s a push for full inclusion into the regular education classroom. This might work for some special education students, but only if there’s time for the special education teachers to co-teach with classroom teachers and time to plan together during the day.

There’s a reason one part of education is called “special.” It is. It’s not about finding a silver bullet cure. It’s about finding different strategies like Mrs. Cue did for me.