Paraprofessionals Plead For Higher Pay

Despite putting in 49 years on the job already, Lucile Patton doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to stop working.

An attendance worker, Patton has been checking up on James Hillhouse High School’s absent students for the last half-century. She now earns $32,100 annually, barely enough to put anything away in savings.

“I’m working at this age, because I can’t afford to retire and live,” she said.

While Patton hopes she might have ​“a chance to get out into the world” soon, she said she might not be able to before ​“the Lord calls me.”

“Please think about us poor paras,” Patton told the school board earlier this month at one of its last in-person public meetings. ​“I’m not speaking so much for me. But I’m asking for those who are working and who will be working, that they will have something to look forward to, that they can afford a little time of relaxation and not worrying day after day, about how they’re going to eat, buy their medication and pay their bills.”

New Haven’s paraprofessionals — the roughly 500 unlicensed educators who work as Head Start leads, assistant teachers, special-education aides, parent liaisons and outreach workers — say they’ve long felt disregarded within the school system.

After years of broken promises, the union, which is largely made up of women of color, is fighting to change those working conditions.

Their pay is among the lowest in the city. Salaries start at $22,300, which would fall below the federal poverty line for a single parent with two kids, and they max out at $42,125.

And their required medical contribution takes away a lot of that money. The district deducts at least one-fifth of every paycheck, unless they opt for a high-deductible plan that could come with as much as $6,850 in out-of-pocket expenses.

Paraprofessionals are also regularly being asked to step in as substitutes when a teacher is absent, despite a 2009 settlement that was supposed to prohibit principals from doing that for more than one day.

3 Jobs To Pay Rent

That salary and benefits make it hard to survive in New Haven, said five paraprofessionals who spoke to the Independent.

One said she has to work three jobs every day, from 7:15 a.m. to 10 p.m., just to pay her rent after her husband died.

One said she sometimes has to stop by her relatives’ place for dinner at the end of the pay period, when she’s run out of money for food.

One said she’s worried about being able to keep paying for her medications after facing health issues.

“We are the hard-working poor,” said Hyclis Williams, the paraprofessional union’s newly elected president. ​“We’re very dedicated workers who continue to be the very best we can be, with the little we get. Turnover is incredibly low despite our low wages and inadequate benefits. We do not do this job for the dollars; we do it because we love it.”

“We do, however, need and deserve to make living wages for our families,” she added. ​“People can’t pay their insurance, they can’t buy food, they can’t pay rent — all those things that go with being poor people. Please honor our jobs.”

Under new leadership, the paraprofessionals have been organizing together to demand a raise in their latest contract that’s currently being negotiated.

Even though the school system is facing another year of budget cuts, the union’s push has been picking up support — including from one school board member who’s been so adamant about their cause that the chief financial officer accused him of negotiating against the district’s interests.

Over and over, in interviews with the Independent, paraprofessionals said they felt that their contribution to kids’ education hasn’t been taken seriously.

But all of them said that they do it because they find it so rewarding to help kids learn. The pre-kindergarteners start out unable to hold a pencil, and the paraprofessionals help them through the most fundamental skills.

“When they finally get it, their eyes light up; mine tear up,” one paraprofessional said. ​“We worked hard, and we did it together.”

No Way Up

Paraprofessionals said that there’s also no real incentives to advance themselves.

Like the administrators and teachers’ contracts, which both contain between 11 and 16 salary steps based on experience and education, the paraprofessionals contract used to offer more money based on seniority.

But after years of winnowing down, it now groups all employees into four steps for classroom assistants and just two steps for Head Start teachers.

That revision, which took effect in 2017, set Earl Jackson back.

After 22 years in the school system Jackson is making just $22,313 annually, as a paraprofessional at High School in the Community, where he tutors students throughout the day.

He said that’s just a few hundred dollars more than what he made back in 1988, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching hospital in Boston.

“I’m ashamed to tell people, because I do have secondary education,” Jackson said, who has to work two other part-time jobs at Yale-New Haven Hospital and Continuum of Care.

Jackson said paraprofessionals deserve a substantial raise, after rising medical costs have eaten into past increases. He said he thought each paraprofessional deserved about $5,000 more, which would amount to a $2.5 million increase in the budget.

“It’s always the same thing, the same excuse when it’s time to negotiate our salary and contract: There’s no money,” Jackson said.

There’s also little incentive for paraprofessionals to continue their education — unless they plan to become certified teachers — outside of a requirement that some assistant teachers need to take college classes in early childhood education, as part of their school’s accreditation from the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Several told the Independent that they want to enroll, but they can’t afford it.

“They want us to go back to school. How? We can’t survive on what you’re giving us. How are we supposed to do that?” one pre-kindergarten assistant teacher asked. ​“If I had the money, I would. But I don’t have the money.”

Wal-Mart, Not NHPS, Pays

Angela Walder, an assistant teacher at Barnard Environmental Sciences Magnet School, was one of the paraprofessionals who want to continue their education. She aims to eventually earn a master’s degree in counseling and psychology.

New Haven Public Schools said it couldn’t pay. But Wal-Mart said it would.

Walder is now finishing her undergraduate degree in an online program that Wal-Mart subsidizes for all its associates, even for part-timers like her. She essentially pays $1 every day for her share of tuition, she said.

“If they will pay for you to go to school, and they don’t have a union, why are we doing all this?” Walder asks. ​“You would think a school district would pay to educate their employees: the stronger they are, the stronger their students will be. You can’t educate somebody if you’re not educated yourself.”

She said that helping paraprofessionals enroll in college classes would also professionalize their work, helping some newer assistant teachers understand what’s developmentally appropriate, especially for students who are challenged by poverty or disabilities.

“If you paid us more, gave us more skills to deal with what we see, we’d come to work every day happy to work,” Walder said. ​“Otherwise, they just work for the health insurance. There’s nothing to really motivate you.”

When Walder interviewed for a job in another school recently, a principal was ​“dumbfounded” after looking over her transcript and resume, which contained numerous credits.

“Why are you still a para?” he asked her.

She said that off-handed remark reflects how most of the school system thinks about the district’s assistant teachers, because it contains this premise: ​“Who would want to be a para?”

Walder said she doesn’t want to be a classroom teacher. She said she cares more about connecting with students — a role whose importance became even clearer to her when her son was put into special-education classes after being diagnosed as borderline.

“You know what kept me going and kept me true? I’d say: I hope today is a good day for my son. I hope he gets a teaching assistant like me, just a human being like me, that cares about him, that’s not just overburdened with the school’s demands, overworked and underpaid and stressed out,” she said. ​“We’re like their caregivers. We’re the people that the parents can trust.”

Raise Postponed

The topic of paraprofessionals’ concerns was also raised at the Dixwell Community Management Team’s February meeting, after a talk from the Board of Education on the budget constrictions that New Haven public schools were facing.

Phillip Penn, the chief financial officer of the city’s schools, had just finished his latest in a series of presentations to management teams across New Haven urging residents to advocate for more state funding for New Haven schools.

“So now’s not the time to ask for a raise?” interjected Nina Silva, the chair of the Dixwell management team who works as a part-time paraprofessional educator in New Haven.

Part-time paraprofessionals haven’t gotten a raise in years, Silva said. ​“I love my job, I love my schools,” she said, but she’s been ​“looking toward Hamden” as a result of New Haven’s low pay.

“We do a lot,” she said. ​“In my four and a half hours of work a day, I do more work than teachers do” all day, she said. Part-time paraprofessionals have it particularly bad, Silva argued, since unlike full-time employees, they aren’t unionized.

Darnell Goldson, a member of the Board of Education whose district includes Dixwell, expressed his support for Silva. ​“We’ve been talking about doing more for paras for years,” he said, adding that the paraprofessional workforce is ​“largely women, largely black and Latina.”

Goldson urged Silva to press the case at Board of Education meetings, since ​“the squeaky wheel gets the oil” — the more the Board hears from paraprofessionals, he said, the more likely it is that they will get the raises they deserve.

At Monday’s board meeting, after several paraprofessionals testified during public comment, Goldson proposed giving paraprofessionals an extra $50 for every day they’re asked to fill in as a substitute teacher.

He said that was more than double the $19.50 that Penn had proposed, but it was still close to half of what it would cost to pay for a substitute teacher.

Matt Wilcox, the board’s vice-president, said he wanted more information about the financial implications. He moved to postpone any vote for two more weeks until the next board meeting.

In a 4 – 3 vote, with Goldson, Larry Conaway and Tamiko Jackson-McArthur in opposition, the board voted to postpone the vote on any proposed raises for paraprofessionals.