Parents of kids with special needs fume as Edmonds district considers preschool closure

Apr. 22—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.

Right now, Leggett's son has four to six adults in the classroom at any given time. Leggett is worried that with the proposed changes, her son would just have access to one untrained staff member for most of the day.

Parents are also worried their children with special needs wouldn't be included in the new schools in mixed classrooms with general education students — a tactic proven to improve growth for special education students.

But the district said the preschool program would continue to offer inclusive classrooms that combine the two groups of students.

"In fact, this change in the model will allow us to expand our inclusive preschool to more of our district's youngest learners," wrote Darcy Becker, the director of early learning, and West Keller, the manager of student services, in the email to parents sent Thursday.

Next year, Leggett's son would have to take the bus to Alderwood Early Childhood Center, which is 8 miles from his home. And when he enters first grade, he'll have to change schools again.

She's angry the district first sent an email announcing the potential closures but didn't explain that some of the special education teachers would be let go until the board meeting. She said the district should have been more transparent.

Harmony Weinberg, the spokesperson for the district, said Edmonds schools has followed typical procedure for budget changes. From January to March the district had regular budget workshop sessions, which the public was welcome to attend, but few did, Weinberg said.

"The reduced education program that was presented by the board [last Tuesday] was the first reading, staff who would be impacted by it were notified, but that was the first time it came out to the community," Weinberg said. "Now we are doing as much communication as we can to answer questions and explain things and respond to the community. That is how the process often works."

The district said the Woodway Center preschool was always intended to be temporary, a stopgap measure to address overcrowding at two elementary schools back in 2021.

"The goal has always been to return kindergarten students to their neighborhood school," said Weinberg said.

Students starting kindergarten in the fall will move to either Sherwood Elementary or Westgate Elementary. Preschool students will move to the Alderwood Early Childhood Center.

Jennifer Roper, a special education teacher at Sherwood Elementary wants to see Woodway stay open. She said, "To push students with neuro and developmental differences out of their current social circles in school communities is both wrong and incredibly harmful."

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