St. Augustine’s Flagler College is offering its first master’s degree in deaf education.
At the same time, a nationwide shortage of special-education teachers is creating vacancies in deaf-only classrooms.
Flagler College offers undergraduate degrees in deaf education, as do many other colleges and universities in Florida, but Flagler’s director of deaf education, Margaret Finnegan says having a master’s program will train teachers to deal with specialized cases.
“We now have children who are coming to us with a variety of disabling conditions in addition to their deafness. So, fully 30 to 40 percent of the children we’re educating have additional disabilities,” Finnegan says.
She says because deafness is so uncommon, most colleges won't spend money to create programs.
That, combined with the fact that deaf students are increasingly attending regular public schools, has created a deaf-educator shortage.
“The number of vacancies for those types of teachers, called "itinerate" teachers, has grown. At the same time a number of programs that train teachers of the deaf have closed around the country,” she says. “This is primarily because this is a ‘low-incidence population’ and those programs tend to be small.”
According to data from the U.S. Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics, Florida remains in the top 15 states with special-ed teaching vacancies. But the Sunshine State is also one of the largest producers of special-ed teaching graduates.
Finnegan says the Flagler master’s program is mostly online in hopes of graduating more teachers for the deaf.
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