Without pictures, for example, it’s hard to imagine a school in which all the classrooms are heated during the cold months by small wood stoves because there is no electricity. Or one without any trash collection so the garbage piles up outside the building.

The session, titled “A Day in the Life around the World,” began closer to home, however, with a photo essay from Pleasant Hill Elementary in Austin. Narrated by Education Austin paraprofessional Carmen Elizalde, the photos illustrated a typical day with Kathryne, an autistic student Elizalde works with one on one. Even before the session moved on to the other two countries, the Austin presentation provided a striking example of the conference theme “It Takes a Team To Make Education Work.” From the time she catches a school bus in the morning until the driver drops her back in the afternoon, Kathryne interacts with an amazing cross section of staff, from the cafeteria workers for breakfast and lunch to the custodians she passes in the hallway to the office staff to special education teacher assistants as well as an array of teachers and specialists.

And Elizalde is there at her side throughout the day to help. “It really does take a whole team, including parents and staff, to make these students successful in their everyday endeavors,” Elizalde said.

The Austin team approach made the contrast with schools in Georgia and South Africa even more striking. The Educators and Scientists Free Trade Union Congress of Georgia, represented at the conference by general secretary Manana Gurchumelidze, has about 140,000 members but just over 6,000 are non-teaching staff, similar to our PSRPs. The “typical” school featured at the AFT conference has 11 non-teaching staff for a student population of around 260. Gurchumelidze admitted that her union has never paid much attention to their PSRPs until they were contacted by the AFT to participate in the international session. Now the Georgian union has gone as far as planning its own PSRP conference based on the AFT’s example. “We plan to take more care of them, thanks to you,” she said.

On an individual level, the employee from Kojori Secondary School who was featured in the photographs—37-year veteran Natela Gvaradze—has become something of a local celebrity after word spread that her story would be featured in a meeting in the U.S. Gvaradze is something of an all-purpose worker who cleans the halls, rings the bells, greets the students and runs the wood stoves that are the only source of heat in the school during the cold stretch from November to May. For that, she earns about $32 a month, plus an additional $30 during the months when she tends the stoves.

Many of the services enjoyed by Kathryne in Austin are only a fantasy in Georgia, where there is no electricity in the school in addition to no cafeteria or school buses and only a small library with outdated books. There is one speech therapist and a small medical room with one nurse. A voucher system recently introduced by the national government as part of school “reform” has squeezed the school’s finances to the point where parents are putting in large amounts of their own money to support it.

On the positive side, as is clearly the case in South Africa as well, Gurchumelidze said the students are very eager to learn and to benefit from their education, despite the obstacles.

If anything, the situation at Bona-Lesedi Secondary School in Mamelodi is even more challenging. Rebuilding an education system that serves the entire population has been a priority for the country in the 12 years since colonial rule and racial segregation ended. Support staff are extremely rare in South African education. The school featured at the PSRP conference, with about 1,500 students, has just three non-teaching staff, who are all basically cleaners. The man charged with cleaning the classrooms, halls and grounds has a hose and a single small trash container—but nowhere to dump the rubbish so it piles up outside in the school yard. Classes are large, typically 45 or more students, and other resources for students and staff are scarce. The school has only one computer and one duplicating machine, but it also has something that most students don’t enjoy at home—running water. As a result, they carry it home after school, which for most is a six- to eight-mile walk. Because vandalism is a regular problem, the cleaner doubles as a security guard and lives in a small building by the school.

“Our school system is far from ideal,” said Shireen Pardesi, chief negotiator for the South Africa Democratic Teachers Union, “but we are certainly getting there.” She said the union sees education as a key to building a better life and a peaceful, more prosperous country.

Based on their reactions to the session, the PSRPs not only want to tell their own stories, but they want to use the images of schools in other countries to engage their own students in talking about how different their experience can be from their counterparts abroad. Many in the audience requested copies of the photo presentations to share back home.