UFT urges Council to act on raises for paraprofessionals

Members of the United Federation of Teachers and elected officials are demanding that City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams schedule a hearing on proposed legislation that would provide paraprofessionals with annual payments of at least $10,000.

Full-time paraprofessionals earn low pay, starting at $31,787 a year, which has resulted in widespread staffing shortages that the UFT predicted will only get worse. The union’s president, Michael Mulgrew, estimated that there will be at least 4,000 vacant paraprofessional positions going into the 2025-2026 school year.

To address the staffing shortages, the Council is considering a bill that would provide paras with a $10,755 non-pensionable payment this year. But though the legislation has the support of 48 Council members, Council staffers recently informed the UFT that there were no plans to schedule a committee hearing on the bill, Mulgrew said at a Friday press conference.

“Because of the number of people who have signed onto this bill, they must give us a committee hearing. So I’m asking the speaker to intervene,” Mulgrew said. “We have a crisis in our school system. We cannot fill the position of the paraprofessionals. It is time for the city to recognize that it is their responsibility to fix this crisis.”

A Council spokesperson said only that the legislation is going through the usual legislative course. "Introduction 1261 was introduced in April and is going through the Council’s legislative process, which is deliberative and allows for thorough public input.”

Priscilla Castro, the UFT’s paraprofessional chapter leader, said the $10,000 payments would be a “great help” for paras. 

“The living wage sucks, so our paraprofessionals are leaving, because they cannot survive in New York City. This bill will change this,” she said. “Come 2027, for [collective] bargaining, we need to do better than 3 percent and 4 percent. Because a 3-percent raise for a paraprofessional is only $900. It’s not OK.”

The Manhattan Borough president, Mark Levine, who has also signed onto the bill, noted that para salaries were abysmally low. “You can work as a barista and make more in this town,” he said. 

He added that legislators had “a very short window of time” to address the para staffing shortage. 

“If we don’t solve this now, it’s going to be too late to fill those vacancies by September,” said Levine, who is running for city comptroller. “And actually, the number of vacancies could rise because there are paras who are waiting to see whether the city does the right thing. And if we don’t, there will be resignations, only increasing the number of vacancies. So we have to act now.”

The bill has received the backing of Council Members Susan Zhuang, Keith Powers and Julie Menin, who also spoke at the rally, as well as Public Advocate Jumaane Williams.

More than 21 percent of city public school students, or more than 197,000 students, have a disability. The DOE employs about 28,000 paras, according to Castro, the paraprofessional chapter leader.

Paraprofessionals work in classroom settings under the general supervision of a certified teacher, mostly in special education and early childhood education.

The advocates emphasized that each unfilled paraprofessional position represented services students are not receiving, such as having a para accompany students on a school bus.

“If there’s any child in New York City who’s not getting the education that they should be getting because of a staff shortage, that’s on us in government,” said Council Member Erik Bottcher, who noted that paying essentially poverty wages to educators was a moral issue.

TreVaughn Taylor, a paraprofessional who works in Queens, asked when Adams would set a hearing date.  

“Many of us work multiple jobs just to survive, pouring everything into supporting other people’s children while struggling to provide for our own. That’s not sustainable,” he said. “The $10,000 respect check isn’t a luxury, but it is a necessity. It is a step towards dignity, towards fairness and towards justice.”

clewis@thechiefleader.com