April 1, 1999
Contact: Peggy Shaw, (615) 322-NEWS
[email protected]
Vanderbilt's Alliance Project: helping minority children with special needs
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - The number of minority children with special needs in American classrooms is rising, but teachers trained to help these students are in tragically short supply. What will happen to them without the special attention they require?
That's the concern of the Alliance Project, a Vanderbilt University-based program helping to place more diverse special education teachers and services in America's classrooms. "We have a huge shortage of special education teachers of color and yet we have large numbers of children in special education programs from diverse backgrounds," said Deborah D. Smith, principal investigator of the Alliance Project at Vanderbilt's Peabody College of education and human development. "In the next five years, only 5 percent of education graduates will be teachers of color."
Originally funded by the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs in 1991, Alliance functions as a clearinghouse, working with historically black colleges and universities, as well as institutions with 25 percent or higher enrollment from underrepresented ethnic groups. Staff workers assist more than 1,000 special education faculty members from 380 institutions in the United States and its territories, primarily helping to write grant applications for more federal funding that will provide student support in the form of stipends and scholarships. Alliance also mentors faculty members and examines issues relating to accreditation and curriculum. What is the project's success rate? Here are some examples. In the last three years, Alliance staff helped to secure some $2 million in grants for Louisiana's Xavier University. That represented 45 scholarships and stipends for African-American students and substantial acquisitions of computer equipment. Alliance also helped Northwest Indian College provide training and assisted the University of Texas at El Paso in implementing a bilingual special education program in two Apache communities. (more) "I think that Alliance has a lot of expertise that allows them to negotiate the system," said JoVita Wells, associate director of sponsored research at Tennessee State University in Nashville. "My first contact with Alliance was through a young faculty person who was given editorial support for a special education grant. Alliance helped get her through the process with substantive mentoring, and she was funded the first time out. That's very unusual."
Schools such as TSU need all the help they can get in putting more diverse special education teachers in the classroom. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the percentages of non-white students are climbing. In 1993-94, for example, some 32.7 percent of students were classified as non-white, and yet data from the same year indicated that 42.3 percent of U.S. public schools had no teachers at all from minority groups. To assess this problem, Alliance recently was awarded a $177,000 federal grant to study the shortage of faculty members who are teacher-trainers for minority children with disabilities. The grant will be used to learn more about the supply and demand of special education faculty and determine whether the field is facing a significant shortage of leadership personnel who are prepared to fill college or university faculty positions.
"This could well influence the way the U.S. Department of Education funds doctoral programs in special education," said Smith. Funded in 1991, Alliance was first based at the University of New Mexico and moved to Vanderbilt in 1997. "We wanted to be with a special education faculty that's on the cutting edge," Smith explained. "Being at Vanderbilt where so much research is going on, where special education practices are being studied and developed, provides us with a solid base from which we can extend our work. The federal government recently renewed the Alliance Project through the year 2003; the project has an annual budget of $1.5 million for each of the next four years. For more news about Vanderbilt, visit the News Service home page on the Internet at www.vanderbilt.edu/News/, or for additional information about the Alliance Project, see the project website at www.alliance2K.org, or call (615) 343-5610 or (800) 831-6134.
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