What does your school need from a learning specialist?
Hiring a learning specialist starts with the role, not the résumé pile, because "learning specialist" is one title for at least three different jobs in the postings and role descriptions we read. Write down which one you are hiring before you post.
The first job is direct remedial instruction with struggling readers — the work the Orton-Gillingham and Wilson credentials below describe — delivered one-to-one or in small groups. The second is coordination — accommodations, classroom consults, documentation and the file review your division heads never have time for. This version also shows up under the titles learning support specialist and interventionist.
The third job is program-building: caseload design, service agreements, parent communication and the policies that let the program survive the specialist who built it. A school hiring the third job should say so in the posting: it is a different search, with its own pay, sourcing and retention questions.
Decide the delivery model next, because it sets the schedule, the room and the hire. Pull-out sessions run on a fixed schedule and need a dedicated room and blocks of student time; push-in support puts the specialist inside classrooms and needs teachers willing to share their space; a consultation model trades student hours for teacher training.
Then size the caseload from your own records: the students with documented plans or service agreements, the weekly minutes each one is owed, and the evaluation and parent-meeting load on top. That number becomes your screening question in the interview and your retention conversation two years later.
The need is easy to underestimate. NCES's 2020-21 survey found 4.9% of private school teachers had special education as their main teaching assignment, against 14.4% of public school teachers.
Yet 59.1% of private school teachers had at least one student with a disability in their classes. Of those teachers, only 12.9% had a major, minor or certification in special education, and 56.4% had taken any coursework on serving students with special needs. Your classroom teachers are already carrying these students; the specialist concentrates the expertise.
One scope question schools miss: whether you serve students a public district places or refers to you. When a public agency places or refers a child with a disability to a private school or facility, different duties attach.
The state must ensure the child receives special education at no cost to the parents, under an IEP and with the rights of a child served by a public agency.
Parentally-placed students sit in a different lane. The district spends a proportionate share of its federal IDEA funds on equitable services and makes the final service decisions, and a child whose parents chose your school has no individual right to the services they would receive in a public school.
This page is the learning-specialist role hub in our library on hiring for private and charter schools; the sections below take the hire end to end.
If you need the seeker-side picture first, start from what a learning specialist does and adjust it to the duties you have just written down.
Looking to hire? Post your learning specialist role on SchoolHires and reach people who already work in private and charter schools.
Post a Learning Specialist Job →What qualifications are required at a private vs a charter school?
Two different rulebooks apply, and they do not merge.
For a private school, start from how BLS describes the occupation. Special education teachers in public schools must have at least a bachelor's degree and a state certification or license; private schools, BLS says, typically require a bachelor's degree, and their teachers are not required to be licensed or certified.
That is BLS's national description, not your state's rule. An accreditor may set faculty expectations for the schools it accredits, and a school-choice program your school joins may set teacher rules of its own. Confirm the rule that binds your school with your state education agency before the qualification line goes into the posting.
What differentiates candidates is the specialist training stack, and it is checkable. The Orton-Gillingham Academy's Classroom Educator level requires a bachelor's degree, at least 30 hours of coursework and 50 hours of supervised practicum over at least 8 consecutive months.
The Associate level steps up to 70 hours of coursework and a 100-lesson supervised practicum over at least 8 consecutive months. The Clinical level adds 100 more hours of coursework — 170 in total — plus 200 more supervised lessons across at least 2 academic years.
Wilson Reading System credentials run their own ladder. Completing WRS Level I Certification makes the holder eligible for the Wilson Dyslexia Practitioner (W.D.P.) credential, and Level II — four advanced courses — leads to Wilson Dyslexia Therapist (W.D.T.). The International Dyslexia Association recognizes both Wilson levels as Accreditation Plus programs.
The IDA's own credential is examination-based: candidates demonstrate mastery of IDA's Knowledge and Practice Standards by passing KPEERI, the Knowledge and Practice Examination for Effective Reading Instruction. A pass on a standardized exam is easier to verify than a workshop certificate.
If your specialist delivers services funded through a district's equitable-services spending, one federal nuance applies: private school teachers providing IDEA equitable services to parentally-placed students do not have to meet the federal public-school special education teacher qualification requirements.
Charter schools run on the public-school side of the line. The federal IDEA rule requires each public school special education teacher to hold full state special-education certification (or enrollment in an approved alternate route) and at least a bachelor's degree, with no emergency or temporary waiver.
For public charter school teachers, though, the same rule says the requirement is whatever certification or licensing the state's charter school law sets, if any. LEA status matters as much as certification: a charter that is its own local educational agency is itself responsible for meeting IDEA Part B requirements, unless state law assigns them elsewhere.
If the specialist will supervise teaching assistants, note that the federal Title I paraprofessional qualifications cover paraprofessionals hired by an LEA who work in Title I-supported programs. They do not apply to aides hired by private schools, and they exclude staff whose duties are purely non-instructional.
Rules change, and school types differ. Confirm the qualification rules that bind your school with your state education agency — and, if you are a charter school, with your authorizer — before the posting goes up.
How much should you pay a learning specialist?
The closest thing to a published rate for the role itself comes from NAIS's member-school data. For 2025-26, NAIS member schools reported a median lowest salary of $68,544 and a median highest salary of $87,200 for learning specialists.
Read those numbers for what they are: the median across member schools of each school's own lowest and highest salary in the role — not percentiles — and NAIS member schools only, not a market average for the private sector.
The federal tables need a label, because our sources carry no learning-specialist wage. The nearest published group is Special Education Teachers, All Other (SOC 25-2059).
In BLS's OEWS for May 2025, across elementary and secondary schools with all school ownerships combined — public district, charter and private together — that group shows a median annual wage of $78,840, a 25th-to-75th percentile range of $62,120 to $102,930, and employment of 24,730.
The wider occupation frame: BLS's Occupational Outlook Handbook reports a median pay of $67,170 for special education teachers overall, and a median wage of $61,290 in private elementary and secondary schools. Neither figure is learning-specialist pay.
NCES's survey gives the sector frame you will recruit from, with its year attached. In 2020-21, regular full-time private school teachers averaged $46,400 in base salary — $45,200 Catholic, $40,100 other religious, $56,000 nonsectarian — against $54,400 in charter schools and $62,100 in traditional public schools, summer earnings excluded. Those are 2020-21 averages, not current pay.
None of those numbers is what your school must pay; they are the context for what you can. Set the band from your own faculty scale and the caseload you designed, then check it against the benchmarks above.
If you are an NAIS member school, DASL — the benchmarking database NAIS runs with more than 40 associations — gives you full access to data from over 1,800 contributing schools.
The total package moves offers too. At NAIS member schools in 2025-26, the median school contributed 50% of tuition remission for faculty, 6.0% to retirement plans, 90% of employee health premiums and 64% of dependent health premiums.
Where do you find learning specialists?
Run the channels in parallel rather than one after another through the season.
Start inside. The 2020-21 NTPS numbers cut both ways: 59.1% of private school teachers had at least one student with a disability in class, and 56.4% of those teachers had already taken some coursework on serving students with special needs. A current teacher with reading coursework may be one supervised practicum away from the role — and funding that practicum may cost less than a failed external search.
Credential cohorts are the other concentrated pool. Orton-Gillingham Associate candidates complete a 100-lesson supervised practicum over at least 8 consecutive months, and Wilson Level I candidates complete a supervised practicum of their own — candidates mid-training are already invested in the method.
The bodies that keep the standards — the Orton-Gillingham Academy, Wilson Language Training and the International Dyslexia Association — publish their credential requirements: coursework and practicum counts, and the Fellows who deliver the training.
That published detail is what makes a candidate's stated level checkable against the issuer's own standards.
Graduate programs in reading, special education and language-science fields produce candidates with strong coursework. Ask each one whether they hold the supervised-practicum credentials above, because coursework alone does not tell you.
Then post where the sector looks. It pays to see your listing the way candidates see it: browse learning specialist jobs before you write yours.
A strong posting tells a candidate the pay, the contract term, the start date, the caseload and the delivery model; a vague one leaves all of that out.
How do you screen and interview learning specialists?
Screen against the credential stack, not the résumé vocabulary. "Orton-Gillingham trained" can describe a 30-hour Classroom Educator course or an Associate-level practicum of 100 lessons; ask which level the candidate holds, who supervised the practicum, and over how many months the lessons ran.
Ask the same precision about Wilson. Level I certification makes the holder eligible for the Wilson Dyslexia Practitioner credential; Level II, four advanced courses, leads to Wilson Dyslexia Therapist. Know which depth the role needs before the interview, and verify the credential with the issuing body rather than the résumé.
For dyslexia-specific claims, the IDA credential is exam-based — candidates pass KPEERI against IDA's Knowledge and Practice Standards — which makes it a checkable fact.
Build the interview around the work rather than the conversation.
A case-file review — an anonymized struggling-reader profile and the candidate's first three moves — tests diagnostic reasoning. A short demo lesson with a real decoding objective tests delivery. A sample written report to a parent tests the communication half of the job.
Bring the caseload you sized into the interview and ask the candidate to react to it. Candidates who ask about scheduling power, assessment tools and referral paths are screening you right back, and that is a good sign.
For staging, panels and scoring across roles, our guide to the interview process covers the mechanics; this page stays on what is specific to learning-support hires.
Run the safety checks in the same pass as the academic ones, and complete background checks before the first day. Who must be checked, and how, is set by state law for the schools and roles each state names — confirm the current rule with your state education agency rather than borrowing another school's procedure.
Keep interview questions on the work: the diagnostic process, instruction, documentation and family communication. A candidate's own medical, disability or family information is not yours to probe, and asking every candidate the same set keeps your comparisons fair.
When in the hiring calendar should you start?
Work backwards from the start date you need rather than from a national calendar. The events that move a learning-specialist search are local: your contract and intent-to-return cycle decides when internal candidates surface, re-enrollment sharpens the caseload, and district timelines matter if you take district-placed students.
Credential timelines matter too. An Orton-Gillingham Associate practicum runs a minimum of 8 consecutive months, and the Clinical level's practicum spans at least 2 academic years.
A candidate mid-practicum cannot finish inside a summer hiring window, so plan around credentials that are already complete or fund the practicum as part of the package.
Wherever your dates land, budget real time for the checks after the yes: confirming credentials with the issuing bodies, reference calls, and the background screening your state requires.
The month-by-month mechanics live in our guide to the teacher hiring timeline; anchor yours to the cycle above and adjust it to your school.
How do you onboard and keep them?
Onboard to the caseload, not just the school. Hand over the documented plans, service agreements and parent-communication history in week one; introduce your specialist to the assessment tools and student-information system with real access; and put the pull-out or push-in schedule in writing with your division heads before students arrive.
Protect the scope you hired for. Caseload creep — documentation that grows, consults that multiply, instructional hours that dissolve — is the fastest way to lose a good specialist, so revisit the caseload number you set at hiring every term and staff to it.
Fund the next rung on the credential ladder. The Orton-Gillingham levels progress from Classroom Educator through Associate to Clinical, and Wilson runs Level I to Level II — a school that pays for the next level and grants the time for the practicum is offering a career, not a job.
Some outside grants go to teachers directly. Fund for Teachers grants are open to full-time PreK-12 teachers in public, private and charter schools in the continental US, Hawaii and Alaska who spend at least 50% of their time directly instructing students and have at least three years of teaching experience. The teacher applies, not the school, and applications run October through January.
Where the role deserves it, build a second rung internally: a lead learning specialist or director of learning support title carrying the program-building duties from your original scope decision.
The specialist who wants to build a program then has somewhere to go inside your school, rather than at the school down the road.
Retention is where hiring pays itself back: the credential stack you funded walks out the door with your specialist, so keeping them is cheaper than re-running this search. Our guide to teacher retention covers the plan.
Employer information, not legal or tax advice. Certification and background-check rules come from your state — confirm the rules that bind your school with your state education agency before you act on them.