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My Son an Ed Tech, in his words. [1]

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Date: 2022-10-09

The Ed Tech: An Impoverished Skilled Laborer

If you’ve never worked in a school, the role an ‘Ed Tech’ or a ‘BHP’, sometimes known as a ‘paraprofessional’ may be foreign to you. The part a paraprofessional plays in the life of children may go unnoticed and unannounced. I never had support staff in your school growing up, maybe you didn’t either. Or maybe you remember faces of school staff with clarity.

Whatever your background, I’ll outline the roles, skills and actions ed techs fulfill daily. Then I’ll discuss how they are compensated for that labor. Lastly, I tie things together.

Element removed drawn by Billy Raptor

The Role and Skills of a Paraprofessional

The job of an ed tech is to support the school in any way it needs. Skilled ed techs typically do the daily work determined by principals, special education teachers and classroom teachers. These responsibilities can range from working one on one to support students in alternative education plans (IePs), behavior plans for students challenged with trauma, behavior disorders, difficult life circumstances, learning disabilities to substitute teaching, mediating student conflicts, and carrying out courses of curriculum and scaffolded educational instruction.

If these sound like jobs for people who have skills and experience managing difficult situations in a tactful and socially crucial role, you’d be correct.

Who Does This Work?

The range of people attracted to paraprofessional roles are various. Some ed techs really are secondary incomes, so some ed techs are mothers or fathers of children in the schools. Others are former teachers, both from the U.S. and from outside it.

A large group are immigrants who were full teachers in their home countries. One of my colleagues speaks seven languages and was a teacher for over twenty years in Africa and in France. Some of them have escaped wars, many from the same countries our student populations come from. Some act as go-betweens for those communities. They know the cultures, backgrounds, and experiences of our students.

My direct colleagues work with children that would not be in public schools without therapeutic or behavioral support. As a standard, they are hired because they have years of experience working with families and children in crisis . These kids daily cope with generational poverty, recover from or experience generational trauma, or are challenged with mental disorders and learning disabilities. Some of our students emigrated away from wars, and have seen anguish and death before the age of 8. The ideal ed tech is someone who has been trained in behavioral health, has excellent coping skills, stability, compassion and a knack for therapeutic work.

This year, we have seen massive turnover among ed techs. Our behavior program, which requires highly skilled and tactful behavioral health professionals and tutors, has been offered unskilled, untrained employees, making the same wage as employees with years of behavioral health experience. It seems obvious that this is because the pay for our work is so low that we can’t attract skilled laborers.

The Issue

When you put unskilled, inexperienced ed techs in a school like ours, or in a behavioral program like ours, things are bound to go wrong for students. With teachers who are insensitive to the needs, traumas, and sensitive work of behavioral therapy, the work simply doesn’t happen. Students who before could handle being in class are slamming doors, screaming, and escaping from fawn-like employees who react with no thought. And the skilled employees around them must clean up their daily fallout, and are expected to train them. And for the same wage!

The why and what of paraprofessional pay

In education school our professor Dr. Larissa Malone taught us that school wages are low because traditionally school jobs are seen as a family’s secondary income, “a woman’s work”.

The cost of living in Portland Maine is $29,328 a year for a single person and $67,968 for a family of four. [$2,444 * 12 and $5,664 * 12 (Cost of Living Calc]. My income hovers around $22,000 a year before tax. There was a vote last month to change this, and this was the agreement between the union and school board. The step increase recently voted in brings a Portland ed tech up to around $23,210 a year before tax. For a family of four, imagining that the two earners in the family make an ed tech wage, it would be $46,420 for two, before tax and other costs. After two years it would be $24,254 and $48,508. After three years, it could grow to $25,345 and $50,690. Both figures are still below this year’s cost of living, $29,328 for the single earner and $67,968 for a family of four.

The cost of living increases each year and after three years of proposed increase, it would still put ed techs thousands of dollars below cost of living each year.

We can compare the ed tech wage to other less skillful and necessary professions. It would not be hard evidence admitted in negotiations. However in public discussion, it’s often argued that our wage is competitive for the ed tech industry. So it seems useful to talk about what other industries offer and what level of skilled labor is required in those industries. For instance, an ed tech coworker of mine worked as a bartender and waitress working part time. She told us that she could easily make the same working one day a week for a year. She told us she made more than her ed tech income by working one day a week and full time in the summer, about 2.5 months. My mom’s neighbor was an ed tech who worked three jobs for 30 years. One of my colleagues bought their house in the 1970s before Portland became a COVID-19 escape-destination, living on an ed tech wage with yearly raises and two other jobs, has taken 40 years to pay it off.

There are a wealth of resources that show that pay for school staff directly effects student outcomes. That’s because skilled, stable and well-cared-for staff can provide stability and growth in turn for the students with which they work. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Concluding Remarks

Many ed techs are using their jobs in schools as primary incomes, and it takes up most of their time. Our society pays ed techs as if they are just doing the job for fun. They are paid like they don’t need to receive a living wage. They are forced to find outside funding to do a delicate and skilled job that requires tact, knowledge, emotional labor, and intellectual focus. What they get with their current pay-structure are either skilled and creative laborers under duress or unqualified people for whom healthcare and any income or stability is desirable, no matter their match for it. These workers need to possess the ability to educate at all times and to be role models for our children. At the current price point, we are buying dysfunction, dangerous situations for students, a lack of education, and high turn-over.

We are not centering schools around what children need from us.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2022/10/9/2127976/-My-Son-an-Ed-Tech-in-his-words

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