Real Respect for Paras

It would include, at the very least, a path to tenure.

In NY State, school secretaries, who may not deal with students at all, are considered pedagogues. Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad for that. That grants them tenure, and consequently protection against abusive principals who, like UFT President Michael Mulgrew, fire people out of personal pettiness. Paraprofessionals are not considered pedagogues. They can be fired on the spot. As chapter leader, I saw it happen twice.

Once it happened when an elderly paraprofessional was assigned to supervise a student who had a tendency to run away. After she was fired, she spoke to me of something her pastor said to her. I kissed her goodbye and said we’d file a grievance on her behalf. Shortly thereafter I received a call in my classroom. The fired paraprofessional had a stroke. Her family was frantically questioning whether or not to place her in an ambulance, as she no longer had health insurance. Shortly thereafter, she passed.

Tenure might have saved her life. It seems to me that there should be a path, perhaps through a two-year degree at city colleges, for paras to earn tenure. It seems to me, in fact, that there ought to be more training for this job than, “Here’s your bathroom key and good luck.” That particular line of training may work for some. (It’s reminiscent of what I had as a beginning teacher, and I eventually caught on.) We can certainly do better.

This is not even on Unity’s radar.

Nor, as far as I can tell, is the fact that TRS is now notifying some retired paraprofessionals that not only are their pensions being cut in half, but they must also pay back half of what they’ve been paid since they retired. This is due to an error TRS made. Evidently, the message is, “We made a mistake and you must pay for it.”

Aside from the obvious, the financial ruin this will certainly bring to people already on very small pensions, this has got to be a nightmare of paperwork. Imagine revising 15 years of your back taxes. Imagine trying to recover overpayments from the IRS. Imagine the stress this would cause a person who retired on the promise, from TRS, of a set pension at a certain rate. Imagine being up all night wondering whether you should have stayed on, or whether you can get your old job back.

As far as I can tell, Unity has spent not one moment focused on any of the above. They have never cared about paraprofessionals. They can talk about “para power” until they’re blue in the face. The fact is real para power is something they abhor, as it caused them to at least give the appearance of doing something.

When a small group of paraprofessionals mobilized around the banner of Fix Para Pay, they stirred genuine panic in the Unity Patronage Cult. At first, it was nothing, but then there was an election. Fix Para Pay (FPP) took 75% of the vote. Unity had seen nothing like it before.

Fortunately for Unity, FPP ran a very small slate, just a handful of candidates. Unity won the lion’s share of seats by default. Still, paras had sent a message. They were tired of living on fumes and hungry for an alternative to the machine that essentially ignored them ever since they unionized in 1969.

One FPP member who won a seat was Migda Rodriguez. Despite the election, Unity did not see fit to give her a job. You see, when you elect people in the United Federation of Teachers, for the most part, they are positions in name only. For example, I’m the elected Vice Chair of the Retired Teacher Chapter (RTC). However, I have no job responsibilities at all.

Fortunately, I’m not in need of a job. Things were different for Migda. Because paras make so little money, she needed two jobs to make ends meet. Therefore, Migda had no time to attend union meetings. Unity ridiculed her, painting her in a funny hat a la Where’s Waldo. Their contempt for uppity paras was palpable.

This tone deaf attack resonated against not only Migda, but also all the hard-working paras who needed second jobs. I’ve known many. They were eventually shamed into granting Migda a role and a job. However, last year Mulgrew cleaned house, arbitrarily and capriciously firing every UFT employee he deemed insufficiently loyal.

Screw the electorate, decided Mulgrew, after winning the closest election in his Cult’s history. Meanwhile, he and his minions dangled a non-pensionable ten-thousand dollar bonus in front of the paras, and have been doing so for over a year. Of course this bought them votes back last year. Most paras are likely unaware that Mulgrew could have simply gotten them a pensionable raise, but stoking apathy is what Unity does best.

This elusive bonus is known as the Respect Check, but it fails to live up to its name. First of all, no one has received this so-called respect. More importantly, paying me off doesn’t mean you respect me. It means you fear me, and are buying me off so I will once again sit down and shut up, the thing Unity wants most from us.

I’ve been teaching for over forty years and I honestly doubt I could do a para’s job. The concentration it takes to focus on one child for hours each day has to be really taxing. It requires almost infinite patience. Don’t even get me started on paras who have to perform acts like taking children to the toilet and cleaning them. Has Unity negotiated a pay differential for them? Of course not. So much for respect.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. If you want good people to do this kind of work in good faith, you need to make it worth their while. Unity has had well over half a century to do so, and has not lifted even one of their many well-compensated fingers. The simple fact is paras need a raise, not a tip. But they also need a worthwhile career ladder.

Paras do indeed merit respect. What Unity is offering is a parlor trick. It may or may not work. But their rationale is lacking. The city did not include this check as part of the recent budget. Unity’s message to paras, responding to this, claimed that other things happened outside the budget process, is true (if you don’t look closely).

Their examples are clearly preposterous. It is indeed true that Door Dash, Uber Eats, and private developers have been compelled to pay workers outside the city budget. However, none of these workers were ever paid within the city budget, and it was not the city required to pay them more.

It’s hard to believe our dues pay Patronage Cult Members to concoct such nonsense. Wouldn’t it be great if we hired people based on competence rather than loyalty?