When Student Support Is Delayed, Everyone Feels It
Most of the talk about K-12 staffing shortages centers on hiring, and for good reason. Postings sit open for months. The applicant pool for a school SLP or psychologist can be a handful of names, and sometimes it’s zero.
Ask a special education director what worries them most, though, and the answer tends to be their team that’s already at capacity, the students on that empty caseload, and what happens to them between the day the position opens and the day someone new finally starts.
Federal data suggests the problem is widespread. According to NCES, most public schools reported hiring difficulties heading into the 2024-25 school year, including special education, and many said they were understaffed in specialized student support roles. Only 48% of public schools felt they could effectively provide mental health services to every student who needed them.
Providers see it from the inside. When eLuma surveyed providers for our State of Student Mental Health Report, nearly 80% said they had moderate-to-low confidence in their school’s student support systems.
Hiring will always be part of the answer. The more urgent matter is how to keep delivering consistent services while a position stays open.
Key Takeaways
- An open position in special education or student support usually means delayed services, missed IEP minutes, and eventually compensatory services.
- Roughly 1 in 8 teaching positions in the U.S. are vacant or filled by someone without full certification, according to the Learning Policy Institute, and special education is the shortage area states report most.
- The staff who remain absorb the extra work, which raises the risk of burnout.
- Delays hit students hardest, slowing progress and giving behavior concerns time to escalate.
- Districts that turn to teletherapy for hard-to-fill roles tend to stick with it; eLuma district partners stay an average of five consecutive school years.
Students feel the impact first
Kids on an uncovered caseload rarely know there’s a vacancy. They just notice that speech sessions have stopped for a few weeks, or that the counselor they’d started to trust isn’t around anymore.
Early intervention depends on timing. A language concern caught in October is much easier to address than the same concern in April, after months of missed sessions. A behavior issue without support usually gets bigger. Districts end up paying for that delay later, in more intensive (and more expensive) intervention.
Internal teams carry the strain
ASHA’s workforce data shows how little room there is to absorb that. In its 2024 Schools Survey, 79% of school-based SLPs said job openings in their area outnumbered people looking for work, up from 54% in 2018.
The median caseload was 50 students. SLPs themselves consider a manageable caseload 40, which means the typical school SLP is already carrying about 10 more students than they think they can serve well before anyone leaves.
As the load gets heavier, planning and progress monitoring are usually the first things to slide. More of the week goes to rescheduling around gaps and answering whatever is most urgent.
Caregivers feel the uncertainty
Families may not see the staffing challenge directly, but they feel its effects when support is delayed, inconsistent, or harder to navigate.
A service start date gets pushed back twice. The IEP they signed in the fall doesn’t look much like what their child is actually receiving by spring.
That gap between what was promised and what’s delivered is where trust wears down, and once a family stops believing the school will follow through, it takes a long time to win them back. For district leaders, it often shows up as more parent meetings and, in some cases, formal complaints.
Where service gaps take shape
Service gaps rarely start with a crisis. They build slowly. A few missed sessions turn into weeks of missed minutes, the staff covering the vacancy start to wear down, and families begin asking harder questions.
By the time a gap is obvious, the district often faces compensatory services, compliance exposure, and a team close to burnout. The legal stakes keep climbing, too. In a CEC and NASDSE survey of 31 states, written state special education complaints rose 46% last year.
Hiring can’t be the whole plan. Districts also need some way to keep services running while they recruit.
The Fully Loaded Cost of a Vacancy
Budget conversations about a vacant position usually start and end with salary, which leaves out a lot.
Here’s what the numbers look like for a school-based SLP:
ASHA puts the median academic-year salary at $74,849. BLS data shows benefits make up 38.8% of total compensation for state and local government employees, so with benefits included, a single full-time SLP costs a district about $122,300 a year.
If that SLP leaves, there’s a replacement bill on top of it. LPI’s research on the cost of teacher turnover puts it at roughly $12,000 to $25,000 per departing teacher for separation, recruiting, hiring, and onboarding, with larger districts at the high end. Given how few candidates there are for related services roles, there’s little reason to expect those positions are cheaper to fill.
The empty months cost money, too. Compensatory service hours, overtime for the people covering, and the occasional legal fee come out of different budget lines, making them easy to overlook and hard to add up.
Residencies, grow-your-own programs, and better pay can all help, but they take years to show results. Students on an IEP don’t have years. Districts need a way to keep services steady now, and for a growing number of them, that means looking for qualified providers beyond the local hiring pool.
Teletherapy Has Become a Permanent Part of District Staffing Strategy
Many districts first try teletherapy out of necessity. Some expect it to be a one-year fix. Then services start quickly, students stay with a consistent provider, and when a provider’s availability changes, coverage continues without the district having to restart the search. By the next hiring season, keeping it is an easy call.
eLuma’s providers join a district’s existing special education and student support teams, take on caseloads that would otherwise sit uncovered, and keep services on schedule so internal staff aren’t doing two jobs at once. Each district partner also has a dedicated Customer Success Partner who stays involved for the full school year.
We support districts with hard-to-staff roles in IEP-based related services, counseling, specialized instruction, and behavioral health support.
Aimee B., an Assistant Director of Special Education in Minnesota, described it this way:
“Whenever we face staffing challenges, eLuma quickly gets onboarded and navigates our schedules and systems, ensuring students don’t miss services.”
