Special Educator Receives National Honor for Service

Chuck Salzberg has spent his career building the field of special education, influencing policy and serving on national boards. But his greatest love is mentoring graduate students.

It’s fitting, then, that he received the Distinguished Service Award from the Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children in early November 2014.

It’s also no surprise to those he has mentored along the way. When they talk about Salzberg, the same words come up again and again: amazing, dedicated, personable.

“I’ve watched him as an example of how to get things done,” said Belva Collins, the Special Education department chair in the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

The award recognizes Salzberg’s leadership in special education. He has been an educator, a department head at two universities and the president of two national-level organizations.

“His ability to frame issues and questions and his ability to design programs is really amazing,” said David Forbush, associate director for the Center for Technical Assistance for Excellence in Special Education within the Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services at Utah State University.

Forbush remembers looking into graduate programs when he was preparing to earn his doctorate. Salzberg was the Special Education and Rehabilitation department head, and his influence helped USU’s program show an amazing sense of purpose and clarity, he said. Department leaders knew what issues their graduates would meet, and they went about organizing the experience those students would have so that they would be prepared.

“I didn’t find any other place that even came close,” Forbush said.

That sense of leadership has been important at the university level, but its effects are also felt by families of children with disabilities.

“If a good PhD program is producing good researchers and good service providers, if it can bring to bear the best of knowledge about how to support students in their growth, then it can make a tremendous amount of difference,” Forbush said. He is a former director of special education for the Cache School District as well as a former chair of the American Council for Rural Special Education. Teacher preparation — particularly for special education teachers in rural areas — has been important to him.

Salzberg has done a lot to bring good preparation to special education teachers throughout Utah and the United States, he said.

Salzberg’s pioneering work helped universities deliver training over long distances, allowing people in rural communities to be certified as special education teachers and paraprofessionals.

“We’ve created programs that literally blanket the state,” he said. “They absolutely were needed, and Utah State University is a perfect institution to do that.”

Belva Collins worked with Salzberg on nationwide distance education policy. She also taught some of those distance courses through USU while she was at the University of Kentucky.

“There are never enough teachers of special education in those rural areas,” she said.

It’s always a challenge to bring educators away from population centers, and for special education the problem is more acute because the field has such high turnover. Salzberg was involved in securing funding for the distance training programs ? and that made it possible to train people who lived in the community and loved it, rather than to try to lure in professionals from the outside.

“There’s no way rural areas are going to have that sort of expertise unless you bring it to them,” Salzberg said. “That’s what we did.”

Salzberg’s leadership has included policy work. Special education was created through federal legislation, he said, and the regulations that followed determined how it would be carried out.

“It’s really important to create good, well-intentioned regulations,” he said.

His influence happened through organizations like the Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children and the Higher Education Consortium for Special Education. He served as the president of both.

“That has offered us a great deal of visibility,” said Ben Lignugaris-Kraft, the current department head of Special Education and Rehabilitation. Salzberg rubbed shoulders at the national level, which probably helped the department’s programs rise in national rankings. In its 2014 edition of Best Graduate Schools, U.S. News & World Report ranked the department’s Rehabilitation Counseling program at ninth in the nation.

Salzberg said the thing he has enjoyed the most, though, is mentoring doctoral students.

“They are going to become faculty members,” he said. “They’re the ones who create programs that train special education teachers. The more they know, the better they are, the better the prognosis is for those youngsters who have disabilities.”

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Contact: Chuck Salzberg, c.salzberg@usu.edu

Writer: JoLynne Lyon, 435-797-1463