Posted on: Friday, December 27, 2002

Special ed recruiters still needed by state

It's understandable that there's considerable ongoing criticism of a contract between the Department of Education and a headhunting firm that is bringing special education teachers from the Mainland.

The DOE is negotiating a fourth year with Columbus Educational Services, which to date has brought 219 special ed teachers to Hawai'i. The company is paid about $100,000 per year for each teacher it brings here.

Criticism generally centers either on the high cost or the procedure by which Columbus was selected and hired.

The answers to both stem from the Felix Consent Decree, the federal court agreement that mandates improvement of special education services. As we've said many times, if the state had taken its legal responsibilities seriously from the start, it wouldn't have been required to make expensive fixes on a crash basis.

The contract was granted by former Superintendent Paul LeMahieu using the powers given to him by federal district Judge David Ezra. Those so-called "superpowers" allowed him to bypass procurement laws, so Columbus was selected without a bidding process.

LeMahieu, the DOE and the Department of Health were under pressure because the federal court had set a benchmark that not less than 85 percent of Hawai'i's special education classrooms would be staffed by licensed or trained special ed teachers by September 2000.

The DOE doesn't have that constraint in its "regular" classrooms; when math teachers aren't available, other teachers with lower qualifications do the best they can. Because of Ezra's requirement, and because there's a severe national shortage of qualified special ed teachers, meeting the 85 percent figure simply wasn't possible on the DOE's recruitment resources alone.

Columbus has done the job, even while placing special ed teachers in hard-to-fill rural schools. The challenge now is to keep from dropping back below the 85 percent requirement.

As the DOE seeks to renew its contract with Columbus, however, we think lawmakers and the Board of Education must now begin looking closely at the teachers being supplied by Columbus.

Although hiring them is expensive, it's probably worthwhile — provided a high percentage of those teachers can be retained after their obligation to Columbus expires. If all or most of them return to the Mainland at the end of their contracts, then we begin to wonder if Columbus may have to be retained indefinitely.

That's not an acceptable outcome.