You want to know bus drivers' average annual salary? How about the percent of college secretaries who work full time? Or how staffing ratios in schools have changed in the past decades? The information exists, but you have to know where to look. Salary data might be available from a couple of sources, average hours worked from another and a whole range of information from the AFT. But no one has pulled that data together to create a more complete picture of PSRPs--until now.

To coincide with the national union's 25th anniversary PSRP conference in April (see story here), the AFT published It Takes a Team: A Profile of Support Staff in American Education.

The report's purpose is not only to gather better information about PSRPs and their jobs but also to raise their public profile. As AFT president Sandra Feldman notes in her introduction to the report, "It is time to pull back the curtains and train a light upon an almost invisible workforce dedicated to making sure that students are safe, healthy and ready to learn. At 3.5 million workers and growing, school and college support staff make up nearly 40 percent of the total number of employees working in American schools.... School support staff are the living infrastructure that makes public education possible."

In addition, It Takes a Team includes brief profiles of "everyday heroes," individuals and local unions highlighted for going "above and beyond" to meet the needs of students and schools. Regular readers of the Reporter might recognize some of them: the Detroit secretary who purchased alarm clocks for students who could never get to school on time, the New York state bus drivers who put together a cookbook to raise their profile among the public, the San Antonio union leader who brought together computer-savvy students and PSRPs who needed technology training, among others.

The report includes a brief history of PSRPs that shows a remarkable change from 1950, when the earliest estimates reported about 288,000 support staff in elementary and secondary schools. They made up about 22 percent of total school employees. Two landmark federal laws brought an influx of new support staff into schools. The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which included Chapter 1 (now Title I) led to the hiring of thousands of teacher's aides (paraprofessionals) to work with disadvantaged children. Eleven years later saw the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142, now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). Like ESEA, the special education law brought many support staff into schools to provide extra assistance to disabled children. Both the federal programs still provide substantial funds to local schools and directly support many PSRP jobs. The report includes a broader description of important federal initiatives affecting students and support staff.

Salary information fills many of the report's pages, but let's admit it: We all want to know what other people make. Granted, it's not quite as eye opening as Parade magazine's annual issue on the topic, but it does clearly show why higher salaries for PSRPs are a top priority at all levels of the AFT.

Some support staff earn good wages. A school electrician, for example, makes  about $40,000 a year. But far more typical--and more numerous in schools--are paraprofessionals, cooks and bus drivers. Their salaries range from almost $17,000 for cooks to $21,400 for bus drivers--if they work full time, that is. More than half of all food service workers, for example, are part time. The report also points out a troubling trend in many districts to hold down the number of hours worked, especially by paraprofessionals, so they can't qualify for benefits.

Much of the report, naturally, focuses on PSRPs in the AFT. Some of that data has been gained from membership surveys over the years and detailed in previous issues of the Reporter. The section goes on to discuss four "quality tools" that the union's PSRPs have focused on in their attempts to improve the services they provide, advance their own job skills and improve the institutions in which they work. The issues, which mirror the AFT's priorities for PSRPs, include:

• seeking standards, professional development and certification;
• fighting privatization;
• monitoring workloads and staff; and
• protecting health and safety.

It Takes a Team concludes with a look at the future of PSRP jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects promising job prospects, especially for paraprofessionals. Among the factors contributing to job growth will be retirements, education reform initiatives (such as expanded early children and reading programs) that will need PSRP support, increasing enrollment of special-needs and English-as-a-second-language students, and the growth of after-school and summer programs.

"Keeping high-quality employees in our schools and colleges means creating high-quality jobs for those who fill these important roles," the report concludes. "And this, in turn, means setting high standards for performance and providing the ongoing training and professional development PSRPs need to excel and advance in their work. Over and over, PSRPs reiterate their desire for more and better professional development. They know that, without exaggeration, students' lives can depend on their ability to perform their jobs well."

AFT Charts; Sources: Bureau of National Affairs, National Center for Education Statistics

The full report is available online or by writing the AFT/PSRP Dept., 555 New Jersey Ave., N.W., Washington, DC 20001.