New Department Head leads Special Education and Rehabilitation

Utah State University’s new Special Education and Rehabilitation department head is used to hearing good things about USU-trained special educators.

“I hear over and over again from state offices, from people in personnel development, that our graduates are highly sought after,” said Tim Slocum, who took over the department’s leadership in July. “I hear it so often, it almost gets a little embarrassing, but I’ll take it.”

The department’s new leadership comes with a familiar face. Slocum has worked in the Special Education and Rehabilitation Department for 25 years. But special education — and the Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services — have more changes on the horizon. In less than a year, the current Center for Persons with Disabilities building will go down and construction on the new clinical services building will begin.

With those changes, new opportunities will come for students and clients college-wide.

“I think it will take a lot of the services that we already offer and strengthen them,” he said. “It will support cross-disciplinary and cross-departmental collaboration to really meet the clients’ needs in a much more complete way. In terms of services, we’ll give our students direct experience learning from other disciplines.”

For example, the children served by the ASSERT program can access speech language pathology services in the same building — and special education students will be collaborating with speech language pathology students in the process. For those clients who could use counseling in addition to other services, it will be available — and students from all over the college will benefit from seeing how different services can build on each other to give clients a more well-rounded approach.

Collaboration is a theme that comes up a lot when Slocum talks about his goals for the department.

“I would like to see really close coordination among all the players in special education and teacher preparation,” he said. “This involves us, but it also involves school districts who are receiving these teachers. We need to talk to them about what they need. We need to make sure we're preparing our teachers to do those things.”

And once they are in the field, he wants to help ensure that they continue on, building a career trajectory and receiving professional development.

These supports matter because, nationwide and in Utah, special educators experience high turnover and high burnout. USU has worked to ease teacher shortages by bringing teacher training to rural areas, but Slocum hopes to find other ways to engage and encourage teachers and paraprofessionals in the field.

The Utah Professional Development Network, which is tasked with supporting special educators, is currently housed within Utah State University’s Center for Technical Excellence in Special Education. Slocum said he looks forward to coordinating with them to meet the needs of both school districts and the special educators who work within them.

He is also pleased to be leading the department he has been a part of for so long.

“I’m super proud,” he said.

Ben Lignugaris-Kraft, the former department head, will remain at the department as a professor.

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