A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n

To Assure the Free Appropriate Public Education of All Children with Disabilities - 1996

Appendix G

Methodology Used to Project Personnel Needs Over a Five-Year Period

In response to the changes mandated in the 1990 Amendments to IDEA (P.L. 101-476) a task force was convened to identify the best method to collect data and to review models that could project the number of special education teachers and aides needed to serve students with disabilities ages 3-21. This Appendix contains the methodology used to project the number of personnel needed.

The method used to project special education personnel is taken from work completed by Jim Wilson (1991). This methodology was selected because it is a simple model that required data on few new variables to be collected by States, yet is expected to yield accurate projections at the State level. The projection model adopted by OSEP to project personnel demand is:

H = (E / S) - R where H = the number of teachers (or related services personnel) needed to be hired,
E = the enrollment of students for the current year,
S = the student teacher (or related services personnel) ratio for the previous year, and
R = the number of teachers (or related services personnel) retained from the previous year.

The purpose of the model is to enable States and OSEP to predict the number of new teachers that will be needed to be hired to fill vacant positions and those not fully certified. These new hires may come from the new university graduates, from the pool of teachers who have temporarily left the school systems, or from regular education teachers who become certified for special education. The model uses three basic data elements to project the number of these individuals: student enrollment, retained personnel, and student/personnel ratio.

Five-year projections of the number of students enrolled, the student/teacher ratio, and the number of teachers retained each year have been entered into the model. These projections are based on historical data for each of these elements. The 1993-94 school year was the first year that data were collected on the number of personnel retained from the previous year. This category represents a subset of the total number of personnel employed. In 1993-94, States reported that 270,027 (87 percent) of the employed, fully certified teachers were retained from the previous year. Additionally, States reported that 13,169 (62.5 percent) of the teachers not fully certified were retained from the previous year.

States found it difficult to provide the number of retained teachers during this first year of data collection. The majority of States initially reported, for at least one category of personnel, greater numbers of retained than employed personnel. Corrected data were later provided by those States. Projections using the number of personnel retained will have to be delayed until a second year of data have been received.

References

Wilson, J. (1991, March).: Projection of Personnel Needs. Presentation at the Fifth Annual Conference on the Management of Federal/State Data Systems.

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[Appendix F]