What Do Paraprofessional Educators Do for Income During School Breaks? A Teacher’s Inside Look
7 a.m. on the Tuesday of spring break, rain streaking the windows of the Main Street coffee shop, I was digging out my ID to get the teacher discount when I heard someone say my name. It was Mia, the para who supports my two nonverbal 4th grade students, and she was wearing a gray polo emblazoned with the logo of the local vacation rental cleaning company, rubber gloves slung over her shoulder. I blinked. “I thought you were off this week,” I said. She laughed, wiped a smudge of window cleaner off her jeans, and said “Off school, not off working. Gotta make rent somehow.”
I stayed for 15 minutes after she finished her opening shift, and over lukewarm coffee, she walked me through what gap filling actually looks like for most paras. In our rural Oregon district, paras are contracted for 182 days, aligned exactly to the school calendar. That means no work, no pay when school’s out for spring break, winter break, summer, even those random three-day institute weekends kids get off. You can choose to spread your 10 months of pay over 12 months to even out your income, but that cuts every regular during-the-school-year paycheck by roughly $300. For someone already living paycheck to paycheck, that’s not a tradeoff you can make. Mia told me her apartment rent went up $270 last August, so even if she wanted to do the 12-month split, it wouldn’t work for her right now.
She ran through the list of what the other 12 paras at our elementary do to make ends meet over break. Lisa, who works with kids with autism in the resource room, does Instacart and Uber Eats. She prefers gig work to cleaning because she can set her own hours around her 8-year-old’s asthma doctor appointments. Jen, who’s been a para for 18 years, does small in-home day camps over summer and spring break. She’s licensed for up to five kids, charges $40 a day per kid, and makes more in two weeks of spring break than she makes in a full month of school. But she can’t quit being a para, because she gets health insurance through the district, and she says she can’t imagine not being in the building with her kids every day. Maria cleans private homes for regular clients on the west side of town, and does pet sitting for people who leave town over holidays. Almost every para I work with has some kind of side work that ramps up when school’s out.
I’ve been a classroom teacher for 12 years, and I still didn’t really grasp how constant this juggle is until that rainy morning. Most parents I talk to have no idea paras don’t get paid for breaks. They see Mia at field day, helping my kids tie their shoes and communicate their needs to me, they know she’s a core part of our classroom, but they have no idea she’s cleaning five vacation rentals a day over spring break to make up the income gap.
It’s a systemic issue, for sure, but there are small, concrete things parents and teachers can do to make this juggle a little easier, and I’ve tested most of them out over the last three years. The first thing that’s made a big difference is a shared, public list I keep of paras at our school who are looking for extra work over breaks. I add their name, what kind of work they do (childcare, cleaning, pet sitting, tutoring), their contact info, and the rate they’ve told me they charge, and I send the link to all parents at the beginning of the school year. Most parents need childcare or extra help over breaks anyway, and it’s a win-win: they get someone who already knows their kid, already has a background check through the district, and the para keeps 100% of the pay, no app cuts. Last summer, three of our paras got enough steady childcare gigs from school parents that they cut their extra work hours by almost half.
Another tiny, low-effort thing anyone can do: if a para you know posts about their side work on social media, share it to your local neighborhood parent group. Most paras don’t have a big marketing budget, so a single share from a trusted parent gets them way more leads than any app. If you hire someone, pay them the same day you get the service, don’t wait a week for a bank transfer. That small gesture makes a huge difference when you’re juggling bills to cover rent.
If you’re comfortable advocating at the district level, one simple ask is to make 12-month pay the default option for all new para hires, instead of requiring them to opt in. A lot of new paras don’t even know the option exists when they sign their contract, and the automatic 12-month split takes a lot of the stress out of budgeting for breaks. Some districts in our area have also started adding a small $500 annual stipend for paras to cover break income gaps, which is another easy ask for school boards.
Mia finished her coffee that morning, grabbed her spray bottle, and headed out to her next rental. She said she’s got three more houses to clean that day, then she’s got her 10-year-old’s soccer practice in the late afternoon. It’s not ideal, she said, but it’s what you do when you love working with kids and you need to pay the bills. I still throw an extra granola bar or fruit cup in my lunch bag for her most weeks, a tiny little thing that doesn’t fix the systemic underpay that puts paras in this spot in the first place. But it’s something. We’re still working on bigger changes at the district level, but for now, connecting paras with work that fits their schedule and lets them keep all their pay is the most good we can do, one break at a time.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Do Paraprofessional Educators Do for Income During School Breaks