Bridging the Gap in Rural Special Education: Paraeducators to Teachers:

Rural school districts have their own set of distinct challenges in providing special education services to children who qualify for them. Resources and resource personnel can be scarce, or in some cases, nonexistent. Additionally, although many paraeducators currently working in classrooms for children with disabilities have the dream to become a certified special education teacher, many, especially those who live and work in rural areas, do not have the opportunity to attend college or university to achieve their goals. These two challenges, scarcity of highly trained special education staff and lack of opportunity to go to college, can be answered in one solution: developing collaborative "user friendly" teacher education programs for rural special education paraeducators that originate in local community colleges. One program in Polk County, Florida (Epanchin & Wooley-Brown, 1993) recruited paraeducators and others from the local, rural area and developed a collaborative teacher education program among the school districts and the University of South Florida. The project stakeholders reported many successes, but some problem areas were evident as well. Although the project was delivered locally, making it user-friendly for the students, faculty had to weather long commutes to teach in the rural county. Another challenge of the project was that several applicants did not qualify academically for admission to the state university. Many of these students were highly recommended by their districts as potential candidates for the project. A state university often has a strict admissions policy, where community colleges are visually more flexible. Distance learning technology has been cited as a practical way to meet the needs of rural teacher training (Knapczyk & Rodes, 1994; Knapcyzk, 1993). One program, called "Teach for Arkansas," used compressed video from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville beamed to a local community college to deliver teacher education courses to a rural county in Arkansas. The target population of the program was community members with little or no college coursework who wished to become certified teachers (Savoye, 2001). The goals of the program were to both recruit and train locally, and the project has proved to be a success in training three cohorts of students for elementary teaching jobs. However, this program did not focus on developing a pool of special education teachers. An additional program in New Hampshire used independent study monitored by experienced mentors (Wei, Shapero, & Boggess, 1993) to support the teacher education process in rural communities. According to the authors, the program consisted of interagency collaboration and solved some of the problems of delivering special education certification coursework to rural areas. However, paraeducators were not the intended target of this program. Why Recruit Pameducators? Many have noted that "the utilization of the paraeducator to support the education of individuals with disabilities has increased dramatically over the past 10 years" (p. 45) even though there is little research to document this trend (Giangreco, Edelmam & Broer, 2001). Although some lament this state of affairs (Brown, Knight, Ross & Ziegler, 1999), one positive aspect of this situation is that the pool from which to recruit teachers has expanded as well, as it is reported that there are over 300,000 paraeducators currently working in special education in the United States (Giangreco, Edelman, Broer, & Doyle, 2001). Recruiting paraeducators to be teachers is not a new idea and others cite this opportunity as a resource when reporting on the training needs of paraeducators (Passaro, Pickett, Latham, & HongBo, 1994). Several factors make it attractive to recruit paraeducators for certified teaching positions. First, paraeducators usually represent the culture or cultures of the surrounding area (French & Pickett, 1997) and are committed to residing in and enriching their community. …