MINNEAPOLIS — Special education students at Karner Blue Education Center in Circle Pines come with high needs and high emotions, requiring teams of teachers and staff members operating at a high level.
But Karner Blue is part of a school system that, like many in Minnesota, is struggling to fill classrooms with teachers licensed to work with the most challenging of special education students: those with autism and emotional behavior disorders.
Soon, however, the school will welcome the first graduates of a teacher apprenticeship program providing educational assistants with on-the-job training and university coursework, and in turn, organizers hope, the skills and resilience needed to stick with a field marked by heavy turnover.
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“I don’t know of a better way to say it than it’s like student teaching on steroids,” said Gina Boots, teacher and apprenticeship liaison at BrightWorks, an educational cooperative now overseeing two cohorts of apprentices at four Twin Cities intermediate school districts.
Some have moved swiftly through the program.
Deb Rime, a native of the Philippines, began working as a paraprofessional with Northeast Metro ISD 916 in 2017-18. She graduates in May as part of the program’s first teacher cohort and already is in full charge of students in Learning Lab 1106 at Karner Blue.
Rime brings rah-rah energy to her work, affirming her students’ actions and answers with gusto. “What’s that shape?” “Rectangle!” “How many cubes?” “Three!” “Tomorrow?” “It’s the weekend!”
Typically, a classroom teacher will ask a question, a student answers, and the teacher moves on, said Amelia Barrons, a special education teacher with Northeast Metro 916. Positive specific feedback, on the other hand, is an evidence-based practice with a strong payoff in special education settings, she said.
“We know that when we are excited and engaged with our students that they are going to be excited and engaged with us,” said Barrons, who works closely with the teacher apprentices as a program navigator.
“I’ll get emotional because I’m so impressed by these people,” Barrons said. “I’m so proud of how far they’ve come. They’re so good.”
A year ago, Boots said the statewide average of special education teachers deemed not to be highly qualified was about 10%, while the intermediate districts — serving students with the greatest needs — averaged about 20%, and the number was growing.
That drove her, she said, to help design and then launch the apprenticeship program in 2024.
“I was really tired of watching students not get the services they deserve,” Boots said.
The intermediate districts started with 20 apprentices in the first two-year cohort and added 30 in the second, with plans to recruit an additional 30 teacher hopefuls for the 2026-27 school year. Minneapolis Public Schools also runs its own apprenticeship program.
Minnesota gauges teacher demand by the number of teachers in various licensure areas who are not professionally licensed or who are teaching outside their licensure field. The largest staffing shortages remain those in special education, with 438 in the area of emotional behavior disorders, for example, and 361 in the area of autism spectrum disorders.
The figures show that even with candidates enrolled in the licensure areas, “there are still significant numbers of positions filled with not fully prepared teachers,” the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board stated in a teacher supply and demand report released in December.
“We should have done this 15 years ago, but we didn’t, so here we are. Let’s go,” Boots said.
Students are placed in intermediate districts when teachers and parents agree that the kids need services not readily available in their home districts. The goal is they get the programming they need to self-regulate and to learn in order to ease their return.
In addition to running her own classroom, Rime also has facilitated meetings with parents to write individualized education programs (IEPs).
Channelle Bell is in her first year in the apprenticeship program and has progressed from an educational assistant who once thought, “Oh my goodness, this is kind of hard,” to yearning to help develop a student’s education plan and thinking, “OK, I want more, give me more.”
She has been taking notes in the IEP meetings and looks forward to the day when she’s confident enough to write her own. For now, however, “I’m like, woo, that sounds scary,” Bell said.
“It is scary,” Rime said.
Recently, Rime held a tablet in front of her students, inviting them to push colors that identified their emotions at the time. Even when it was anger, she never countered by saying they didn’t look angry. She honored their voice, Barrons said, heard what they were saying.
The past two years, Rime said, have been busy and rewarding: “You’re gaining hands-on experience, you’re building your confidence, you’re building your skills, you’re growing every day,” she said. “And at the end of the day, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m almost there. One step closer to being a teacher.’”
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