The University of Houston will train teachers to ease a special needs teacher shortage and improve reading proficiency in students.
The big picture
UH’s Project BRIDGE will fully fund teachers’ master's programs in special education along with structured literacy certificates through an online program, officials announced in an Oct. 22 news release.
Project BRIDGE, or Building Reading Instruction and Dyslexia Guidance Expertise, is funded by a $1.25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs.
The details
The program lasts five semesters for each cohort, and UH plans to accept 42 participants through multiple cohorts in a five-year span, a UH spokesperson said.
The program pays full tuition for a Master of Education in Special Education online degree, which participants can complete while working their regular jobs, said Kristi Santi, the principal investigator on the grant.
It also includes a BRIDGE Certificate in inclusive education and dyslexia support, which teaches disability law and characteristics, instructional programs, data-based decision making and effective dyslexia interventions.
Get involved
Applications are open until Nov. 15, and the first cohort will launch in January 2027, according to the news release.
Eligible applicants must have:
Visit the UH website to apply.
Why this matters
Texas is one of 45 states dealing with a special education teacher shortage, which is the most common teaching field shortage among states, according to the Learning Policy Institute, an education research organization.
Desiree Carver-Thomas, senior researcher and policy analyst at the institute, said the shortage has existed ever since the federal government began mandating free special education in 1975.
Carver-Thomas said the issue stems from teacher recruitment and retention, so education leaders should focus on providing high-quality programs with hands-on teaching practice as well as increasing pay.
“[Training] is really crucial because teaching is such a hard job, and there's so many facets of it,” Carver-Thomas said. “We see from the research that having that preparation is directly tied to staying in the profession."
The program will also train teachers on the science of reading to improve student literacy as some Texas students are not reading at grade level by third grade, per the news release.
“Ultimately, I would love to see the UH BRIDGE participants sharing these strategies with their colleagues, supporting fellow teachers and improving the literacy skills of exponentially more students,” Co-principal Investigator Hope Rigby-Wills said in the news release.
