NYC special education staffing shortage leaves students in limbo, teachers union charges

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At one Bronx school for students with significant disabilities, a single staff member must push multiple students in wheelchairs through the hallways.

In Queens, students with disabilities miss out on traveling to job sites to learn basic career skills because there aren’t enough staff to supervise them.

And across New York City, some students languish at home because they are not allowed to ride a school bus without a dedicated aide.

In each instance, students with complex needs aren’t getting the support they are legally entitled to due to a shortage of paraprofessionals, teacher aides who form the backbone of the city’s special education system. Survey results released Wednesday by the United Federation of Teachers underscored that the situation is most severe in District 75, a network of schools that serve students with disabilities who need more support than typical schools offer.

Paraprofessionals are tasked with a wide range of duties, from tending to students with behavioral issues, breaking down classroom lessons into manageable chunks, helping potty train, and accompanying students who need assistance on bus rides to and from school.

Over 1,400 full-time paraprofessional positions remain vacant, Education Department officials confirmed. There are 23,564 active paraprofessionals, a nearly 8% decline since June 2020.

“What you have is triage going on at schools — we’re having multiple people doing multiple jobs,” Michael Mulgrew, the teachers union chief, told reporters at a press conference. “[Students’] ability to have a good life is what’s in the balance here.”

According to the union survey, which garnered responses from 81% of public school campuses citywide, District 75 schools are hardest hit. About 70% of District 75 union chapter leaders reported staffing shortages; 68% said their school did not provide regular coverage when a paraprofessional is absent; and 76% said students aren’t receiving all of their mandated services, including counseling, speech, and occupational therapies.

Including teachers, therapists, and counselors, there are nearly 2,300 special education staffing vacancies across 474 schools, union officials said, though Mulgrew acknowledged the UFT has not been able to get precise data from the Education Department of staff vacancies and needs. (In response to a Chalkbeat request for more detailed vacancy data, a department spokesperson only shared the figure for paraprofessionals.)

How the staffing shortage hurts schools

When the school year started, Undrea Polite, a paraprofessional at a District 75 school in Brooklyn, said her school was short 26 aides. She and her co-workers are stretched so thin that they worry about leaving the building for breaks during the day, as many of her students have significant needs ranging from emotional disorders to visual impairments.

Polite was recently pulled out of her lunch break to help calm a student because the school’s counselor was tending to another child in crisis who needed to be taken to the hospital.

“You’re on your lunch break, but you’re not on your lunch break because you have to keep your ears out to listen … to make sure that you can keep all of the kids safe,” she said.

At P993Q, a District 75 program in Queens, students sometimes miss out on trips to job sites like Applebee’s or Old Navy because there aren’t enough staff to supervise them, said Rob Roszkowski, who helps coordinate the regular visits out in the community to learn vocational skills.

“Our kids are out every day — community instruction is very important,” he said. “It’s a nightmare for the coordinators to find enough people” to oversee the visits.

His school’s students may take classes alongside their general education peers, part of a legal requirement to educate students in mainstream classrooms to the greatest extent possible. But they can’t always attend those classes because the paraprofessionals required to accompany them are missing, Roszkowski said.

On some campuses, the lack of paraprofessionals has prompted safety concerns for both students and staff. At P186X, a District 75 program for some 700 students in the Bronx, the school is short at least 40 paraprofessionals, estimated Jo Macellaro, a teacher and union chapter leader.

Many of the students lacking one-on-one paraprofessionals have serious medical issues or severe behavioral challenges that require constant monitoring, Macellaro said. The shortage has also made the jobs of the existing paraprofessionals that much harder, creating even more churn and job openings.

A lone paraprofessional might have to push multiple students in wheelchairs at a time, Macellaro said. In one case, a paraprofessional trying to lift a student out of a wheelchair on their own hurt their back, Macellaro added.

“People are just extremely frustrated,” Macellaro said.

Plus, some children with disabilities may be prone to wander from their school buildings, making it even more essential for District 75 schools to have enough staff on hand.

The shortage of aides can mean students never make it to school in the first place. Some students with health or behavioral issues are not allowed to ride yellow school buses without a paraprofessional. If that staffer is missing, families may not be able to ferry their children to school on their own.

“Some of those kids are home, truly home, because they can’t get to school,” said Maggie Moroff, a special education policy expert at Advocates for Children. (City officials may provide a rideshare if no paraprofessional is available, though it can be time consuming for families because a caregiver must commute with them.)

Union officials call for reforms

School staffers and union officials say special education staffing challenges are longstanding, and districts across the country are struggling to hire the staff they need.

In New York City, the starting salary for paraprofessionals is just shy of $30,000 a year, making it difficult to recruit and retain staff.

But union officials said it can be hard to hire new paraprofessionals even when there are candidates for the jobs due to a complex hiring process.

Schools are typically only allowed to hire paraprofessionals who have been excessed from other schools during the first month of the year, and there often aren’t enough staffers in that pool to fill all vacancies, union officials said. And even once principals are allowed to nominate new hires for paraprofessional positions, it can take weeks or months for them to wind through the Education Department’s hiring process.

“As it stands, the paraprofessional hiring system is broken, leaving hundreds — and possibly thousands — of people who want these jobs unable to navigate the application process,” Mulgrew wrote in an October letter to the state’s education commissioner raising broader concerns about special education staffing shortages.

Macellaro said their school’s administration has worked hard to round up more applicants to fill the vacant positions, collecting a list of roughly 80 candidates interested in becoming paraprofessionals.

“Knowing that we have all of these people with their resumes just sitting there in a pile ready to work, and the DOE is just not doing what they need to do to let them work is even more frustrating,” Macellaro said.

An Education Department spokesperson said the nomination period for paraprofessionals opened in October and schools have been able to hire full-time paraprofessionals since late August. The spokesperson added that Macellaro’s school, P186X, has nominated 62 substitute paraprofessionals since last month.

The spokesperson, Nicole Brownstein, said hiring for paraprofessionals remains open for most schools. “We look forward to filling these positions,” she wrote.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org