Special Education Teachers’ Stress, Burnout, and Working Conditions during COVID-19

Stress and burnout negatively affect the effectiveness, attrition, and shortage of special education teachers (SETs). The series of teaching modality changes during the COVID-19 pandemic made the boundaries of the traditional working conditions of SETs unclear. Although existing studies of SETs’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic have explored SET stress and burnout, those studies have mainly used quantitative measures that do not necessarily include teacher voices and have not explored the connections between the factors that cause SETs’ stress and burnout. In this study, we argue that a new range of stressors caused by changes in teaching modality during the COVID-19 pandemic caused the chronic stress experienced by teachers that threatens their health, safety, and well-being. This qualitative study used a focus group interview method with eight SETs from three states in the United States and coded the interview transcriptions using constant comparative analysis method. We used the findings of Brunsting et al. (2014 ) as an organizational framework in analyzing SETs’ stressors during COVID-19 across the individual, classroom, school building, and school district levels. Our findings especially highlight the importance of support from administrators to address the multiple, interconnected aspects of SETs’ stress and burnout. Given the chronic effects of burnout of SETs from the COVID-19 pandemic, this article suggests multilevel guidelines for improving teachers’ working conditions, including increasing administrative support.