Welcome to the Special Education Organizing Toolkit where you will find all of the necessary resources to effectively start the process to address systemic Special Education issues with your association. Organizing can be an effective way to address issues facing educators and students in your school district in a way that gets long-term results and invests back in the school community. Strong organizing leads to stronger bargaining and better working conditions in the long run. Showing members that they can successfully tackle these issues leads to stronger member engagement and a stronger local union.
Steps to Success
- Collect data.
- Help your key constituents prioritize the issues.
- Create a plan to start addressing these issues one by one.
- Celebrate the small wins.
- Continue to build upon advocacy and organizing culture.
- Begin building larger coalitions of support in the greater community
Collect data through site visits and listening meetings. In person communication is important in this process for several reasons. First, these meetings will help your members feel seen and heard. Secondly, this process helps build community among members and lets them know they are not alone. This is also the first step in participation and gives you a good temperature reading on where members are at in being willing to make time to take action on these important issues. You should be able to articulate in a broad way how you plan to address these issues before you meet with members. It’s okay to let members know that once you collect the data, this will inform everyone on how to best move forward. (Examples: district round table, plan to meet with director, using data for bargaining, going to work through the compliance complaint process, etc.)
A second meeting will need to be held virtually or in person to look at the organized data
Resources and steps below are:
- Schedule listening meeting(s) and site visits.
- Site Visit Resources
- Listening Meeting Resources
- *Best Practice: Invite your Special Education educators to the first round of meetings.
- Listening Meeting Agenda
- Listening Meeting Step by Step Directions
- Listening Meeting Slide Deck You will need to make a copy to edit your own slide deck in Canva.
- Sample Notes
Now that you have collected your data you will need to further prioritize the issues and identify how the association will work to address them. Key questions to ask are:
- Is this a short-term, mid-term, or long-term issue?
- How will this be addressed?
- Through bargaining, organizing, grievance, HR meetings, compliance complaints, etc.?
- Do any of these issues need further clarification?
- If so, from whom? District? Staff? Parents?
- Is this a credentialing issue?
- Do any of these issues need further data collection?
Example: High class sizes or caseloads - Can any of these issues be resolved through a Special Education Compliance Complaint?
- Which of these issues would be most easy to resolve?
- What is the outcome you hope to achieve?
- Work to create a plan that includes escalating actions that will build to get members the outcome they wish to achieve.
You know your district and your relationships. - Does this plan include developing more education for members?
- Do you need to start a Special Education committee?
Resources
- BCTF Social Justice Lens: This resource is helpful in improving advocacy and agency among members.
- CTA Special Education Resources: This website has handouts and videos for member education on Special Ed issues.
- Special Education Committee Guide
- Compliance Complaints – What Are They?
- RSP Caseload Waiver – What is it and what are some examples?
- Credentialing Resources
- Organizing Around Special Education Presentation: Use this resource to learn more about organizing.
- Sample chart for prioritizing identified issues and solutions
- Sample chart and tracking sheet you can make a copy of that includes space for an organizing plan and student-centered frame on the second tab- You will organize your notes into this spreadsheet.
- NEA Workload Analysis Tool
- RSP Caseload Tracker
- Sample Workload Tracking Form for the Individual Educator by Time: This sheet contains a descriptor tab where definitions and descriptors can be entered. Total time for descriptors can be entered here. Example: IEP Meetings: 400 minutes weekly. The second tab is where an educator would track their daily time.
- Sample Workload Tracker Form – This form would be used by staff to turn in their data after tracking the minutes they have spent in a week on various activities. Associations should make a copy and insert their own “buckets’ or work descriptors. Additionally, some groups of educators may have different descriptors. For example, an itinerant teacher may have different workload descriptors than a speech and language pathologist.
- Sample Organizing Plan (in progress): See how one chapter started organizing their issues into a plan.
San Marcos Educators Association
Here are the steps that the San Marcos EA took to start addressing Special Education issues in their chapter.
- San Marcos EA held a listening meeting after school using the format described above. All special education members were invited to attend.
- After the initial listening meeting, the PCS created a spreadsheet to organize the issues into “buckets” of topics. Additionally, each topic was identified as fitting into either bargaining, advocacy, or an organizing issue.
- A second meeting was held where the same participants were invited back and they split into two groups; advocacy and organizing. They reviewed all of the issues as a group and then in small groups discussed which issue they would focus on to resolve. They developed a plan for a solution and then at the end of the meeting, both small groups presented to each other.
- After the meeting, each group will work on resolving those issues through the appropriate channels. The idea is that if they integrate this process into their chapter structure, they can start addressing widely, deeply felt, winnable issues and include a variety of members to work towards solutions.
Some chapters may find it beneficial to reach out to parents to support their bargaining and organizing efforts. Here are the steps to coordinate parent meetings.
- Invite geographical clusters of schools to one school site. You may need multiple meetings based on the size of your district.
- Offer childcare, food, or allow parents to bring their children to the meeting.
- Keep the meeting to one hour.
- Teachers and staff can invite parents before or after school or utilize the PTA/PTO relationships to get the word out.
Your meeting will have four parts:
- Welcome: ask staff from the included school site or representatives of the association special ed committee to welcome parents.
- Rights and Responsibilities: a short 20 minute presentation on Special Education
- Hopes and Dreams: In small groups, teachers will facilitate note-taking and ask parents what their hopes and dreams are for their children within the special education programs. Teachers can also ask parents to outline some of the challenges they have faced.
- Next steps: Here the association leadership will let parents know what the next steps are. Examples of this include, using this data for bargaining, sending out newsletters to parents, asking them to come to a school board meeting, etc.
