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Special Education Director Burnout in Montana 85
surveys returned by the participants, 24 (67% of population) were special education directors
for school districts, and 16 (76% of population) were special education directors of
cooperatives. Additionally, 23 of the respondents were female and 17 male. One of the
surveys from a cooperative director was not usable due to excessive unanswered responses on
the MBI-ES survey.
Given the generally accepted definition of burnout based on the use of the MBI-ES
survey, high scores on the EE and Dp dimensions and low scores on PA, five of the 39
Montana directors completing the survey could be categorized as having job-related burnout,
with another four directors being considered at-risk due to high scores in both EE and Dp and
moderate scores on the PA dimension. Of particular note, 28 of the remaining 29 special
education directors sampled scored high on all three levels of the MBI-ES—emotional
exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment.
To investigate whether special education directors of a school district and special
education directors of a cooperative differed on perceived levels of burnout, a chi-square
statistic was used. Table 1 shows the Pearson chi-square results and indicates that directors of
a school district and directors of cooperatives were not significantly different on their
perceived levels of burnout in the dimension emotional exhaustion (x² = .64, df = 1, N = 39, p
> .05), the dimension personal accomplishment (x² = .98, df = 2, N = 39, p > .05), nor the
dimension of depersonalization (no variability between groups). Phi, which indicates the
strength of the association between the two variables, was .128 for EE and .158 for PA, and
thus, the effect size was small or smaller than typical based on the work of Cohen and Manion
(1994). There does not seem to be a difference in job-related burnout between directors
working in Montana school districts and directors of special education cooperatives.
Table 1. Chi-square Analysis of Levels of Burnout Between Special Education Directors in
School Districts Verses Cooperatives.
Variable n District Cooperative x² p
EE Level .64 > .05
Moderate 1 1 0
High 38 23 15
Totals 39 24 15
Dp Level .(a) --
High 39 24 15
Totals 39 24 15
PA Level .975 > .05
Low 5 4 1
Moderate 4 2 2
High 30 18 12
Totals 39 24 15
(a) No statistics are computed because Dp Level is a constant
To investigate whether the educational degree attainment of a special education
director differed on perceived levels of burnout, a chi-square statistic was used. Table 2 shows
the Pearson chi-square results and indicates that the level of educational attainment of special
education directors was not significantly different on their perceived levels of burnout for
emotional exhaustion (x² = .64, df = 2, N = 39, p > .05) and for personal achievement (x² =