Why Do Full-Time School Support Staff Roles Require Letters of Recommendation? A Teacher Explains
I was sitting at a scuffed folding table in our elementary school conference room last week, half-eaten turkey sandwich next to my laptop, sorting through 27 applications for our open full-time behavior support para position. One candidate stopped me cold: 10 years experience working with autistic kids in a neighboring district, all required training hours checked off, even an extra certification in crisis prevention we don’t require for the role. The catch? She only submitted one letter of recommendation. I jotted a note to move her to the no pile, and Lisa, a parent volunteer on our hiring committee whose 9-year-old has ADHD, leaned over and whispered, “Why does that matter that much? Her resume is flawless.”
Five years ago, I would have probably bent the rule back then. We were so desperate to fill a gaping full-time instructional aide spot for our 2nd grade inclusion class that we skipped the requirement for two letters from previous supervisors. We had one generic note from a friend of the candidate who ran a home daycare, and that was good enough for us, because we were tired of floating subs through the classroom every week. The aide we hired was assigned to work one-on-one with Milo, a nonverbal 7-year-old with cerebral palsy who needed help with everything from using the bathroom to communicating his needs to peers.
It only took three weeks for small red flags to pop up. Milo came home with wet clothes three days in a row. His mom said he’d started screaming when it was time to leave for school, something he’d never done before. We checked the hallway cameras one day after a nurse reported the aide had left Milo unattended by the water fountain for 10 minutes while she took a personal call in the lounge. When we finally reached out to her most recent previous employer, the one she’d left off her resume and didn’t use for a reference, we found out she’d been let go for the same exact issue: leaving vulnerable kids unsupervised to take personal breaks. We had to fire her six weeks in, spent another two months recruiting for the role, and in that time Milo and the whole class suffered. Our classroom was off, the other kids noticed the chaos, I was stretched thinner than I’d ever been. That experience is why I will never waive the letter requirement for any full-time support role at our school, no matter how good a resume looks, no matter how short staffed we are.
Most people outside of school hiring think letters of recommendation are just a meaningless bureaucratic box to check, especially for roles that aren’t full classroom teaching positions. But what most parents and even some new teachers don’t realize is that full-time support staff spend more one-on-one time with our most vulnerable kids than any other adult in the building. I’m responsible for 28 4th graders every day. My full-time behavior para spends four hours a day, five days a week, working one-on-one or in small groups with the three kids in my class who have behavioral or learning disabilities. She’s the one who helps them tie their shoes, talks them down from meltdowns before I even have a chance to step in, helps them navigate lunchroom drama when I’m busy with the rest of the class. That work isn’t something that can be measured on a resume. A resume can tell you someone completed 20 hours of de-escalation training. It can’t tell you that they’ll stay with a kid through a 45-minute meltdown even when it cuts into their own lunch break.
We don’t want generic notes that say “she’s good with kids.” We want specific stories. One letter I read for a candidate this year said, “When our nonverbal student got a new communication board last semester, she spent two weeks of her own after-school time practicing the symbols with him so she could help him use it throughout the day.” Another letter mentioned that a candidate regularly checked in with parents after school to update them on small wins their kid had that day, even though it wasn’t part of her job description. Those are the details that tell you how someone shows up when no administrator is watching. Resumes can be polished, interviews can be rehearsed, but a former supervisor’s specific story about a candidate’s work tells the truth no application can.
For parents who care about what goes on in their kid’s school, this matters more than you might think. If your kid has an IEP or any extra support, they’re going to spend more time with their full-time support staff than their teacher on most days. A concrete thing you can do: if your school is posting new full-time support positions, ask the administration what their requirements are for references and recommendation letters. If they only require one, or accept personal letters from friends instead of professional letters from previous supervisors, that’s something you can bring up to your PTA or school leadership as a gap that needs fixing. If your kid already works with an amazing support staff member, offer to write them a letter of recommendation if they ever apply for a new full-time role. Letters from parents who’ve seen their work with your kid firsthand are far more valuable to hiring committees than generic notes from administrators.
After our conversation last week, Lisa got it. We ended up moving forward with three candidates who all had two solid professional letters, and we hired the one whose supervisor wrote about how she stayed after school every Wednesday for a month to help a first grader learn to tie his shoes, because his mom worked late and couldn’t practice with him at home. She starts next week. We’re still short staffed in half our roles across the district. It’s always tempting to cut corners to fill spots faster. I get that pressure, I feel it every single week. But after what happened with Milo, I know that cutting this one corner costs far more time, stress, and disruption for kids and families than any short-staffed gap ever could. We still don’t hire perfectly every time. There’s no checklist that can guarantee you’ll get the right person. But requiring those letters is the simplest, most reliable first step we have to make sure the people spending the most time with our kids are the people they deserve.
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