Portland Public Schools in Maine is considering moving to a four-day school week for special education students as the school district is unable to fill teaching positions.
The school district needs to fill about 30 education technician positions, as well as teachers and therapists, to meet the capacity to handle the roughly 1,000 special education students, according to the Portland Press Herald.
If the four-day plan is put in place, these students will need to make up the missed days at the end of the school year to meet Maine’s minimum 175-day school year.
“We are currently developing a plan to assess whether schools and programs have enough special education ed techs to operate safely, and if they do not, temporarily reassign other ed techs there to support,” the district said in a statement. “We will only move to four-day weeks if even the reassignment plan cannot cover enough vacancies in a given school or program, so we don’t yet know the potential scope or impact.”
“That’s our last step,” Superintendent Xavier Botana told WMTW. “So before that, we have a plan to make temporary reassignments within the district from other positions elsewhere that could help us to prevent getting to that point. So we’d have to be pretty dire for us to get to that level.”
Teacher shortages are common across the country and were exacerbated by conditions during the coronavirus pandemic.
Some states, like Arizona and Florida, have come up with innovative ways to address what many in the education world call a crisis.
In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey (R) removed the requirement that teachers have a bachelor’s degree to begin teaching, allowing prospective teachers to start their training while earning their degrees.
The Florida Department of Education made a similar move, allowing military veterans and their spouses to receive a five-year voucher to teach in classrooms without having a teaching degree.
Teachers’ unions are not happy with the moves from mostly Republican-run states to be inventive with the ways in which they address the teacher shortage.
The teacher shortages are adding more strain to an education system that has seen the worst learning loss in 30 years — almost entirely due teachers’ unions, the Biden administration, and school boards shuttering schools unnecessarily during the coronavirus pandemic.
As Breitbart News reported, Americans’ trust in the public education system has plummeted to its second all-time low.
Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.
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