An exciting new development on the special education front promises to be of great benefit to New York City special-ed yeshiva students and special-ed (P3) tutors, and could lead to the establishment of urgently needed resource rooms in yeshivos across the city.

The development was announced by Mrs. Leah Steinberg, director of Agudath Israel of America’s Project LEARN (which assists parents of special needs children in gaining access to special education and related services for their children), in an August 7 memo to all New York City yeshivos. In her memo, Mrs. Steinberg reports that the New York City Department of Education (DOE) has announced that, beginning with the start of the upcoming school year, P3 providers will be able to service as many as five students in a group setting, with pay rates to be calculated accordingly. Until now, the DOE has allowed only one student per P3 special ed tutor.

The new policy has been a long time coming, says Mrs. Steinberg, who, together with other Jewish school advocates, has worked with the mayor’s office and Ms. Linda Wernikoff, DOE Deputy Superintendent, Office of Special Education Initiatives, to address a number of problems related to the delivery of special-ed services to private school students. Chief among them was the serious shortage of skilled P3 providers, many of whom were reluctant to undertake P3 tutoring because the pay rate was not in line with the hourly rate for other professional special-ed services.

“The ability to group P3 students together, which will result in higher hourly rates for providers, will doubtless attract many more top-flight professionals to the program,” notes the Agudah representative. “Even more significantly, perhaps, the new policy will enable schools to set up their own resource rooms for groups of P3 students with similar educational needs.”

A private school special-ed student is issued a P3 by the DOE when it can be shown that a resource room – which is designed to work on the specific skills a student needs in order to succeed in the mainstream classroom – in a public school setting is educationally inappropriate for the child.  Armed with a P3, parents can arrange for a NYS certified special education teacher to provide DOE-funded resource room services outside the public school and even in their child’s yeshiva.
The relative unavailability of tutors willing to work with one student at a time at the rate authorized by the DOE, however, has, up until now, made it difficult for parents and schools to take full advantage of the P3 program.

While the details have not yet been entirely worked out, the new graduated pay rate for P3 tutoring will likely range from $39.98 per hour for one student to $99.95 per hour for five students.

“The yeshiva community owes a debt of gratitude to Ms. Wernikoff for this important breakthrough,” observes Mrs. Steinberg. “Throughout the seven years we have been working together on numerous special education issues, among them the development of this new policy, it has always been clear that we share one goal – to ensure that every child with special needs, regardless of where he or she attends school, gets the help necessary to succeed.”