The partnership is seen by district leaders and officials as a creative way to partly fill multiple special education openings amid an ongoing teacher shortage. Providing teachers to the two classrooms would prevent the district from having to find out-of-district options for those students, which is always an expensive proposition, officials said.

Also Tuesday night, members approved a resolution to spend roughly $6,350,000 on out-of-district special education costs for 41 students. Because the district is tasked with educating all children, it must find and pay for an appropriate alternative if it cannot provide services to certain students, such as those with severe physical disabilities.

Of those 41 students, 13 will go to Hubbard Day School, 68 Southfield Ave., at a total cost of roughly $2,013,000, or about $154,800 per student.

In comparison, the district will pay $53,125 per student for Hubbard Day to provide their services inside of Stamford schools.

According to district data, there were 47 open vacancies among special education teachers this summer. The district has filled 36 of those since then, leaving 11 openings with only one week left before the start of school.

“This is a creative, urgent solution to address the staffing needs for those students with autism that have severe disabilities,” said Associate Superintendent for Student Support Michael Fernandes during a meeting of the Fiscal Committee of the Board of Education on Aug. 15.

But to executive members of the Stamford Education Association teachers union, the Hubbard Day agreement was met with surprise and disappointment.

On Wednesday morning, John Corcoran, president of the SEA, accused the district of “union busting” by filling a potential union job with an outside contractor. He said the union would file an unfair labor practice complaint against the district.

“It is bargaining unit work and it should be serviced by Stamford Public School employees,” Corcoran said.

The timing of the partnership was also alarming to union officials because union representatives had gone back and forth with district officials for months to reach a memorandum of agreement, or MOA, on July 26 that would provide higher starting salaries to new special education hires, among other benefits, in an effort to fill multiple vacancies before the start of the school year.

“At that point, I thought the deal was a done deal,” Corcoran said.

However, when the MOA was before the Board of Education on Aug. 1, Board members had a roughly half hour discussion on the topic behind closed doors before the meeting started and the board tabled the agreement for a future date during the meeting. 

The date of that meeting is a key detail, Corcoran said. The union president spoke during the Board of Education meeting Tuesday night and said the union received information from “sources” that a new teacher was offered a position at Northeast that will now be filled by a Hubbard Day School employee. But when that teacher went to a human resources meeting on Aug. 1, she was told the position was no longer available and had been outsourced. According to Corcoran, the teacher was offered a position with the APPLES pre-K program instead.

Corcoran did not name the teacher nor provide documentation to support the claims, but said the information led him to believe that the deal with Hubbard Day had already been struck before the Aug. 1 meeting, which he believes influenced the decision to table the agreed-upon MOA. 

The union head said he was “insulted” and “disgusted” by the implication that the school district was negotiating a deal with Hubbard Day before the MOA had been approved and finalized. Corcoran said central office staff did reach out to him with a revised offer for the MOA after the Aug. 1 meeting, but those discussions were short lived as the parties were too far apart. 

Kathleen Steinberg, spokesperson for the district, wrote in an emailed response that the candidate for Northeast was offered the APPLES position because she was state-certified in both preschool and elementary school. 

“The choice of which position to accept was entirely up to the candidate,” she wrote. “If the candidate had selected Northeast, we would have ended up looking at outside providers for APPLES as part of our contingency planning.

“It’s worth noting that, even if an agreement had been reached, there was no guarantee that those 11 remaining vacancies would have been filled in time for the new school year, which is why Stamford Public Schools engaged in conversations with numerous outside providers about delivering special education services that the district is required by law to provide to students with special needs,” Steinberg wrote.

The schools spokesperson also dismissed Corcoran’s claim of union busting.

“Stamford Public Schools is committed to acting in the best interests of its students, which in this case meant contracting with an outside provider to place one state certified special educator in-district on a temporary basis to teach students with autism spectrum disorder,” she wrote. “To call such an arrangement — which was unanimously approved by the (Board of Education) — ‘union busting’ is absurd.”

The Hubbard Day staff that will be at Springdale and Northeast is comprised of one Connecticut certified special education teacher and one board certified behavior analyst, which will switch between classrooms so that students are taught half of the day by a teacher and supervised the other half of the day by the analyst, according to Steinberg.

Two registered behavior technicians, split across the two classes, will help with instruction and support, while each classroom will also have two para-educators each. Additionally, an administrator from Hubbard Day will oversee the two classes. 

Jonathan Trichter, founder of Hubbard Day School, said Stamford schools first reached out to him on July 25 to discuss a possible partnership.

“We were the first call Stamford made and the first solution that they thought of,” he said. “We like to think that it’s because we do this so well.”

The one-year contract could be terminated with 30 days notice, Trichter said, and that the district would pay a prorated amount for the work, as opposed to the full contract in such a scenario.

“Hubbard Day is proud to have the talent and the capacity to help our partner in Stamford to solve a systemic crisis and also a local one,” he said.