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Appalachian State program aims to boost the number of rural exceptional children teachers

88.5 WFDD - Public Radio For The Piedmont | By Paul Garber
Published August 21, 2025 at 7:56 AM EDT
Image shows education building on the campus of Appalachian State University
Courtesy Appalachian State University
The Reich College of Education Building on the campus of Appalachian State University

Appalachian State University is offering a new career program to help address a shortage of exceptional children or EC teachers in rural Appalachia.

More than 100 education professionals from Watauga, Caldwell and Catawba counties are taking part this fall.

EC teachers work with students with intellectual, emotional, or physical disabilities.

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction found there were over 1,500 vacancies in this field across the state in the 2023-24 academic year. That’s a 28 percent increase over the previous year.

The program is supported by a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor.
Education
Paul Garber
Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.
See stories by Paul Garber