LYNNWOOD — When Alexandra Leggett’s son turned 3, Henry could say only a few short sentences. He has a speech impediment and gets overstimulated easily, leading him to shut down.
But once he started attending the Woodway Center preschool everything changed.
“Henry comes home every day just fulfilled, a smile on his face, he wants to tell us all about school,” Leggett said. “A year later, not even quite to his fourth birthday, his teachers tell us that he’s just a little chatterbox.”
Leggett burst into tears when she got an email last Friday from the Edmonds School District announcing the preschool may close in June.
The district faces an almost $12 million budget deficit, the result of a 900-student drop in enrollment in the past four years and COVID-19 federal rescue funds running out. To save money, the district plans to close the preschool, shifting all 200 students into other schools this fall. About half of the preschool students receive special education services.
The district is also looking at potentially cutting almost 40 teachers, nine student intervention coordinators, three security officers, an art coordinator, building office professionals, custodians and elementary assistant principals, among other positions.
On Tuesday, the School Board will vote on whether to accept these proposed budget reductions.
Some of the teachers who might lose their jobs focus on special education. They’d be replaced by “professional technicians,” who don’t necessarily have experience teaching students with special needs, a change that could be detrimental to the progress students like Leggett’s son have made at the Woodway Center preschool.
“I equate it to feeling like I’m going to have a day care provider watching my kid instead of actually giving him an education at school,” she said.
The district clarified in an email to parents Thursday that the professional technical employee group must have, at minimum, an associate degree or higher and at least 30 early childhood credits. And special education teachers will still work in partnership with them, rotating into the classrooms for a couple hours at a time depending on the need.
Eight preschool special education teacher positions would go away under the proposed budget cuts, and the teachers themselves would go into a pool the district could use to fill other positions at the district, but no job is guaranteed.
Parents of special education students along with students from the band program, school counselors and many others showed up enraged at last week’s School Board meeting, where the board presented its possible reductions.
A large group of students, some playing saxophones, tubas and drums, paced outside the meeting protesting potential cuts to the band program. Inside, over 100 people packed the room.
“To make those cuts on the backs of our most vulnerable students, our disabled 3-year-olds in the special education preschool program, is unfathomable,” said Silvia Ferreira, who has a 3-year-old son at Alderwood Early Childhood Center, one of three schools students will move into.
“I think it’s preposterous to consider having a classroom of students without a teacher. We need teachers in classrooms,” Ferreira added.
Source: The Seattle Times