Thousands of school paraprofessionals across the US are being laid off as the school year begins.

Going online is hugely expensive for school districts - particularly considering how rapidly they have been forced to pivot from in-person to this past springs band-aids of Zoom calls and emails, to hybrid models with full-online options, all while girding their loins for what most in education consider inevitable: a rapid pivot back to full-remote as a second wave of the virus hits this fall. Add to this economic fallout and lower budgets due to the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic and government responses.

Considering how tight all school budgets are traditionally (even in flush times, there are struggles to afford even the basics), administrators nationwide are facing hard choices: who to cut. As Pleasant Valley, Pennsylvania, School board President Donna Yozwiak said: “I can tell you, as an educator, and leader of this board, it is agenda items like the one this evening that I dread most. However, we as the elected nine board members of this district, are obligated to address the deteriorating fiscal condition of this district, and therefore hard decisions, such as this one tonight must be made."

In hyper-affluent Brookline, Massachusetts (the town where Tom Brady made his home until his defection to Tampa Bay), the district announced layoffs of 360 people, most of them in specialized subject areas such as arts, music, and physical education, along with school counselors, social workers, and paraprofessionals are affected. In states where districts have reopened, such as in Alabama, there's a staffing shortage since districts need plenty more bus drivers, custodians, teachers and teacher aides to avoid student crowding.

In Tacoma, Washington, out of more than 600 paraeducators employed by the district, 104 were notified they “might not have a job next year,” Tacoma Public Schools said in a statement June 2. Another 348 were issued notices for reduced hours or schedule changes.

Impact on Recruitment

Skilled paraprofessionals are challenging to locate, and land, for districts. Often hourly, and low-paid, they are leaned on heavily to help schools with some of their most challenging students, from those with behavioral and mental health issues, to students with severe learning disabilities. They often require specialized training. Layoffs of paraprofessionals, advocates say, can have long-term academic effects since they develop such intense relationships with students over the years and districts struggle to recruit, retain and quickly train them on the job. Replacing them once districts return to some level of normalcy will be challenging.

The number of paraprofessionals has increased more than 141 percent, partly due to the steady increase in the number of students with special needs, according to a 2014 Thomas B. Fordham Institute study. They typically make a little above minimum wage and there's been a concerted effort by labor activists in recent years to raise their wages to $15 an hour, an expensive and arduous process for the average district since almost a quarter of its staff is made up of low-wage workers. Over half of school district employees are non-teachers, according to research by school financial analyst Matt Richmond, author of The Hidden Half, who points out that: "the educator workforce mirrors that of the wider economy in that “the higher up the chain you are, the more likely that you’ll be fine.”

The often unseen role played by non-instructional personnel was brought into macabre relief recently with the announcement that as of June, 79 New York City school employees have died of coronavirus. Non-teachers — predominantly paraeducators, but also administrators, central department employees and others — made up most of the dead.

As schools re-open, the question becomes: how will they convince this hidden, and critical, workforce to return? The employment brand damage alone may be insurmountable.

Tracking Layoffs

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/3020893/

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