At Andrew Johnson Elementary School in Oklahoma City, the principal sometimes takes applicants for jobs as special education paraprofessionals on a school tour. They usually stop in Terry Goforth's room, where the veteran paraprofessional works with disabled preschool kids. That's often the last time Goforth sees the job applicants.

"Once they get a view of what's involved with the job and the pay," they decide they can't handle it, says Goforth, a member of the Oklahoma City Federation of Classified Employees. Of the six children in her room--staffed by a teacher and two education assistants--only one can walk on her own. The job applicants "are just not prepared for special education," Goforth says, adding that starting pay for some positions works out to less than $9,000 a year.

Wilma Rose, a Colorado paraprofessional working as an occupational and physical therapist, knows exactly what Goforth is talking about. "It's hard to find someone who will stay with it because of the needs that are required," says Rose, a member of the Colorado Classified School Employees Association who works in Brighton, Colo. Some of the duties are "not fun," as she delicately puts it.

If getting people to take these demanding jobs isn't hard enough, they are often thrust into the classroom with virtually no training. While districts might require some background in working with children--or even offer new hires brief introductory training--experienced paras will tell you that these efforts in no way prepare someone to work with today's special education students. "We need training for people before they're brought into the system," says Louise Tangorra, a New York City paraprofessional and member of the United Federation of Teachers. "You're dealing with fragile children, and people have no idea how to handle them. If they tell people, ‘Don't worry, you'll learn on the job,' that's not acceptable."
 

Challenging legislation ahead

While Goforth, Rose, Tangorra and the thousands of paraprofessionals who work with special-needs children every day see how the nation's special education system works in the classroom, policymakers in Washington, D.C., will soon be taking a look at the federal law that is supposed to guide the education of those students. Parts of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (or IDEA), which governs special education, are due to be reauthorized by the U.S. Congress in a process that will probably get under way next spring. Like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which Congress substantially renewed and revised in 2002 to produce the Leave No Child Behind Act, it's likely that many significant proposals to overhaul IDEA will emerge. Some of the changes incorporated into ESEA, on such topics as standards, accountability, and teacher and paraprofessional quality, will likely come up again in discussions about IDEA.

When any education legislation comes up in Congress, the AFT nationally plays a strong role in trying to guide the deliberations in ways that produce the best legislation for AFT members who work in schools. From discussions with paraprofessionals and other PSRPs who work with special ed students, it's clear that more and better training to help them do their jobs is their No. 1 priority. A federal law obviously can't mandate what training takes place in a school in Oklahoma City, for example, but it can set guidelines and authorize adequate funding to make it more likely that paraprofessionals' needs are met.

Lisa Thomas, an AFT staffer who deals with special education issues, says the AFT "certainly is going to support any language in IDEA that shows states have the responsibility to provide training for paraprofessionals." Especially helpful, paraprofessionals say, is anything that would promote more joint training with special education teachers.

"Team building is one of the things that needs to be worked on," says Goforth in Oklahoma City. Many times when schools there are closed for teacher inservice training, paraprofessionals have the day off instead of being involved in the training. In New York City, by contrast, paras often have the same staff development days as teachers, but they don't always learn anything useful. "The school will assign us to something instead of giving us the opportunity to pick something that's meaningful," says New York City para Nancy Delaney. She works with a physically challenged girl, but she might be assigned to something less relevant dealing with mental disabilities.

If classroom assistants are unhappy with the amount of training they receive, other staff such as special ed bus drivers say they have it even worse. "They have classes for the paras, but they don't invite the bus drivers," says Diane O'Leary, a driver in the same Colorado school district where Wilma Rose works. "We should know more about each individual child, about emergency situations, and medical information such as seizures and other conditions." And she wouldn't mind a little more help on how to fix the lifts on their aging bus fleet, which drivers themselves often have to repair. Others with similar complaints about inadequate training could include nurse assistants, food service workers, clerical staff and playground aides.
 

Funding concerns

Many concerns that PSRPs express about special education ultimately come down to funding. Appropriate funding levels for IDEA are regularly discussed and debated in Congress, and that promises to be true next year, as well. As state budget crises have worsened recently, schools have faced money pressures. "Right now in New York, it's bare bones, and it's going to get worse," says Tangorra. "That's the scary part." For her, that means things like no paper towels or tissues for the students, almost no access to photocopy machines and big problems getting books that are useful to special education students. Tight funds can also mean cutbacks in repairs or replacement of adaptive equipment and other assistive technology that can be so crucial to the success of special-needs students.

"With special education, we have to fight for every little thing," says Reggie Colvin, a fellow New York City paraprofessional. "They treat us like stepchildren."

When the special education law was first passed in 1975, it pledged that the federal government would pay 40 percent of the costs of educating students with disabilities because they were more expensive to educate. Unfortunately, the federal share has never risen above 15 percent.

The AFT has strongly supported proposals in Congress to mandate full funding, including during last year's debate over ESEA. As AFT president Sandra Feldman said at the time, "For more than 25 years, the federal government has met just a small portion of its commitment to educate students with disabilities. As a result, states and local governments have had to scramble to find resources to run federally mandated special education programs. This lack of full funding not only shortchanges kids with disabilities but also takes away valuable resources from other educational priorities and programs."
 

Dealing with disruptions

If more training is PSRPs' top priority for special education, better discipline policies rank not far behind, especially for staff working with older students and those with emotional problems. Hazel Burnside, for example, works with high school students with behavioral problems in Minneapolis. "Discipline is a huge issue," says the member of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and Educational Assistants. Since funding cuts have reduced staff for such programs as in-school suspension, "we have to keep them here, and they run wild."

One focus of AFT lobbying on IDEA will be to promote balanced discipline policies that allow schools to address chronic disruptive behavior that interferes with learning for disabled and nondisabled students alike, while still providing the educational services the law requires. "We need to address the issue of chronically disruptive students and where to place them when they can no longer function in their current environment," says Thomas. Current provisions, which allow schools to suspend students with disabilities for up to 10 school days, are woefully inadequate and leave too much discretion to building administrators.

Colvin, who works with autistic students, says a couple things have happened in New York to undermine discipline. The school system restricts the use of verbal discipline, and it has not funded in-school alternative placements, so discipline options are very limited. "These children know the law better than we do," he says.

Thomas points out other issues in IDEA for paraprofessionals to watch for. One is their role in filling out special education paperwork, especially in schools with inadequate secretarial staffing. As with other duties, paraprofessionals need adequate training if this is part of their job. Another issue, Thomas says, is the involvement of paraprofessionals in students' individual education plans, or IEPs. While paras rarely participate in developing the IEP, their services or job duties might be written into a plan without them even knowing it. Failure to inform and educate the paraprofessional could have legal consequences for the school as well as the staff.

With all these challenges, you might wonder why anyone would want to do these jobs. The paraprofessionals and others who work in special education say it all comes back to the students.

"I love my job, and I love the children," says Terry Goforth. "Obviously I do or I wouldn't have been there for 16 years at this rate of pay."

Says Nancy Delaney, who works one on one with a girl with cerebral palsy, "I think I can make a difference with these kids. It keeps my priorities straight each and every day. The little girl I work with, as much as she's a lot of work, she's like a little angel."