Why Schools Can’t Keep Paraprofessionals: It Comes Down to Pay
The email arrived on a Tuesday morning, right as I was trying to get twenty-three second graders to settle into their morning journaling. It was from our principal, short and to the point: Mrs. Davis, our newest paraprofessional, had resigned. Her last day would be Friday.
I read it twice, then set my phone face down on the desk. My classroom para, Ms. Alvarez, was in the back corner helping a student who’d been struggling with his fine motor skills, guiding his hand as he formed letters. She’d been with us for three years. She was the fourth para in that position in five years.
I wasn’t surprised by the email. I was tired.
That afternoon, during my thirty-minute lunch break—which I spent reheating leftover pasta and answering parent emails—I ran into Ms. Alvarez in the staff lounge. She was eating a granola bar and staring at her phone.
“You hear about Davis?” I asked.
She nodded. “She got a job at the Target distribution center. Starts next week. Better pay, set hours, and she doesn’t have to take work home.”
I sat down across from her. “I’m sorry to hear that. She was good.”
“She was,” Ms. Alvarez said. “But she’s got two kids. She can’t afford to work here anymore.”
That sentence sat with me for the rest of the day.
—
Paraprofessionals, teacher’s aides, and teaching assistants are the backbone of inclusive classrooms. They support students with IEPs, they run small groups, they manage behaviors, they help with toileting and feeding, they translate for families, they cover recess duty, they make copies, they laminate, they do the thousand small things that keep a classroom from collapsing.
And they are paid, on average, somewhere between $13 and $18 an hour in most parts of the country. In some states, it’s less.
I’ve had paras who were incredible. Ms. Alvarez is one of them. She knows which students need a quiet hand on their shoulder before they melt down. She knows how to break down a math problem into five smaller steps without making a child feel singled out. She knows the names of every sibling, every parent, every bus driver. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, but she can’t justify getting a teaching credential because the pay bump wouldn’t cover the cost of the credential program.
She stays because she loves the work. But love doesn’t pay rent.
—
The expectations for paras have grown enormously in the last decade. They’re not just making copies anymore. Many are expected to provide direct instructional support, implement behavior intervention plans, and collect data for IEP meetings. They’re often the first person a child sees in the morning and the last person they see before getting on the bus. They’re asked to de-escalate crises, to support students through trauma, to be the consistent adult in a child’s day when everything else is shifting.
But the pay hasn’t kept up. And the gap between what we ask of them and what we compensate them for has become impossible to ignore.
When a para leaves, the classroom doesn’t just lose a staff member. It loses institutional knowledge. It loses a relationship. A student who trusted that person now has to start over with someone new. That transition can take weeks, sometimes months, and in that time, the whole classroom feels it. The teacher feels it. The other students feel it. And the kids who need the most support often feel it the hardest.
I’ve seen it happen over and over. A para gets hired in September. By November, they’ve realized they can make more money working at a warehouse or a coffee shop with less stress and more predictable hours. They leave. The position gets posted. We get a few applicants. We hire someone new. We train them. They leave by spring.
It’s a revolving door. And the only way to stop it is to make the pay match the expectations.
—
I’m not naive. I know school budgets are tight. I know districts are fighting for every dollar. But I also know that we can’t keep asking people to do skilled, emotionally demanding work for poverty wages. We can’t keep saying “it’s for the kids” as if that’s a substitute for a living wage.
If we want to keep good paras in our classrooms, we have to pay them like the professionals they are. That means advocating for higher starting wages, yes. But it also means pushing for benefits, for paid training, for guaranteed hours, for a career ladder that doesn’t force them to leave the classroom to make a decent living.
In the meantime, teachers like me are left trying to hold things together. We write letters to the school board. We talk to our unions. We try to make the classroom a place where paras feel valued, even if they’re not paid like it. We bring them coffee. We thank them. We tell them we couldn’t do this without them, because we couldn’t.
But thank-yous don’t cover childcare. They don’t cover gas. They don’t cover the gap between what a para makes and what it costs to live.
—
Ms. Alvarez is still here, for now. She’s looking at a few other jobs, just in case. I don’t blame her. I’d do the same thing. I told her that.
“I don’t want to leave,” she said. “I love these kids.”
“I know,” I said. “But you have to take care of yourself, too.”
She nodded and went back to sharpening pencils. I went back to my lesson plans. The classroom hummed along, twenty-three second graders reading and writing and arguing about who got the blue marker. For now, it works. But it’s fragile. It always is.
Until the pay matches the expectations, we’ll keep losing good people. And the kids will keep paying the price.
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