Bait and switch? Offer high salaries to flood the field with people trained in special ed and then pull the carpet out from under them? Sounds possible. I mean, $50-$60 an hour is not the highest salary I’ve heard for special ed teachers but even that is quite high (if you compare it to what most jobs with equal amount of training pay – I don’t want to offend the myriads of B”Y girls and their husbands).
$15 is ridiculously low, but supply and demand will enable them to get away with it, at least for a while. In the long term though, it’s dumb because no new teachers will go into the field. But there’s obviously a budget behind this agenda.