In a special education classroom at Tulsa Public Schools’ Skelly Elementary, Kathleen Bitson presses colored blocks into a student’s hand, counting aloud as she picks up each one.
The student has visual, hearing and speaking impairments and uses a wheelchair. Bitson said she and the rest of the special education team are the “voice, eyes and ears” for students like him. It’s challenging work, but she loves it.
“If you don’t have the love and the patience, don’t do it,” Bitson advises. “I love these kids. These are my babies. … I ask myself all the time, ‘What would I be doing (if not) this?’ I feel like this is part of my calling. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Bitson is a paraprofessional educator. Paraprofessionals do not have the same credentials as certified teachers, but they have to undergo certain training — and more so for those who work in special education. They are support staff, meaning school districts usually set their pay at hourly rates.
Bitson never looks at her paychecks. She said she relies on faith to get her through every month of bills.
“All you can do is laugh and pray to God,” Bitson said. “Pray that this will be taken care of, that this bill will be taken care of. Because if you look at the paycheck, you’re like, ‘Will I be able to do this?’”
That’s because paraprofessionals made between $19,730 and $20,388 on average in Oklahoma last year, depending on their specific jobs. Paraprofessionals who spoke with StateImpact for this story reported taking home about $1,000-1,500 every month. The Federal Poverty Level for a family of two last year was an annual income of $19,720.
School support staff received a statewide pay raise after the 2018 Oklahoma Teacher Walkout, but while teacher pay remains a major legislative priority, support staff pay hasn’t gotten the same level of attention. Last year, a bill that would have given districts $1,200 per support staff member for a pay increase failed to get over the finish line.
Paraprofessionals say they’ve felt left out of the pay conversation at the Capitol. That may change this legislative session — Senate Education Committee Chair Adam Pugh (R-Edmond) is championing a one-time $2,500 stipend for support staff. Wednesday, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to include the stipend in its budget recommendation.
“I don’t want us to necessarily be in the business of setting those pay scales, but I think it’s something that was popular on our side last year, and we were able to do a lot of good things last year,” Pugh said. “This is one that I wanted to come back and try to tackle again.”
What do paraprofessionals do?
Brandon Swain works with Bitson at Skelly Elementary. He said his head is constantly on a swivel — attending to students with a high level of needs while also helping them learn important life skills.
“We’re instilling the foundation of manners,” Swain said. “How to treat your friends. How to respect your adults. How to, you know, just live everyday life.”
He said in addition to teaching academics and life skills, many students have medical needs. Paraprofessionals change diapers, monitor medical conditions, food allergies and feeding tubes, calm students down when they experience emotional episodes and ensure students take required medications on time.
Swain said it’s not just a mentally intense job — it’s physical too.
“We have a student out there who’s in a wheelchair,” Swain said. “And he’s a nice-sized boy, you know? So we take him to the bathroom. I have to lift him out of his chair onto the toilet. … I mean, it’s a lot more than what people think. They try to tell you that [being a] para’s an easy job, or teaching’s an easy job — hey, just come spend a week, is all I got to say. Come spend a week.”
Paraprofessionals can be game-changers for some students. Teresa Laudermilk’s son Tariq attends Putnam City’s Will Rogers Elementary. She said one of the paraprofessionals in his class, Candace Daughtery, has developed a special relationship with him.
“She just really loves him like none other,” Laudermilk said. “And that’s really comforting because, for a parent with a child who’s autistic and can’t talk, it’s terrifying. … Every day, you have to kind of let go and put trust in these folks to take care of them. … And we’ve been very blessed to have a great team to work with.”
Laudermilk said Daughtery doesn’t just perform basic childcare – she really understands the needs of students like Tariq.
“If Tariq needs to sit outside the classroom to do some work, just sitting outside with him to get that work done,” Laudermilk said. “And just making sure he’s safe and happy, making friends. All of those things are so important to us.”
Daughtery said as someone who is neurodivergent herself, helping students with disabilities is a passion. She enjoys being a trusted adult in the lives of her students, and she said that means taking the time to build relationships.
“If you don’t have a relationship with the kid, with a student, they’re not going to listen to you at all. They’re going to run away from you, either mentally, emotionally or physically,” Daughtery said. “They don’t trust you — they won’t trust you — if they don’t have a relationship with you. And they can tell who wants one [a relationship] and who really doesn’t care. It’s very important.”
Daughtery works with special education teacher Chelsey Gonzales. Gonzales said Daughtery taps into something special when she works with students.
“With our kids, she is their comfort. She’s their safety. They feel at home with her. I know that if I’m having a rough day and I can’t handle something that Candace can. She’s going to step in,” Gonzales said. “They see her, they love her, they feel safe with her, they feel cared for.”
Gonzales was a paraprofessional before she got her certification to become a special education teacher. She said back then, her family was barely making it.
“You feel like you’re just constantly playing catch up and just trying to keep your head above water,” Gonzales said of her paraprofessional days. “It wasn’t doable. We weren’t surviving. When I was pregnant, there was a point where I couldn’t afford groceries, and I was literally eating cans of Spaghetti-O’s because that’s all we could do.”
Even though certified teachers make significantly more money than paraprofessionals, Daughtery said the work she does now should be able to be a long-term career — not just a paycheck-to-paycheck job.
“What you worry about with pursuing a position with higher pay, moving up, is then, who fills your position?” Daughtery said. “Is it someone who just needs a job and they don’t care about what we do? I really like what I do. But it needs to be more sustainable.”
Gonzales agrees. She said the work paraprofessionals do hugely impacts the lives of the students they serve.
“They’re so important to the school. Like, we can’t run without them. It would be impossible,” Gonzales said.
Dollars and cents
Gonzales and Daughtery work with several students in a classroom. Other paraprofessionals, like Shelley Landers, work one-on-one with an assigned student.
Landers works at a rural school near central Oklahoma, spending her days with a middle school student she accompanies from class to class. After 20 years as a substitute teacher, this is her first year as a paraprofessional.
This will likely be her last year as a paraprofessional.
“I can’t live on $1,100 a month. Who can?” Landers said.
Landers said she loves working with and advocating for the child she’s paired with. But when she applied for the job, she said her district advertised pay as $14.40 an hour for 7.5 hours per day. She didn’t realize at the time that it included health insurance, so she takes home only about $7 an hour. Thankfully, she said she owns her house and car, but she’s going to have to get a second job to make ends meet.
“I still can’t pay my monthly bills. My son pays my phone [bill] for me. And even my mom has to help me out — my mom is 77,” Landers said. “I’ll probably start crying because that shouldn’t have to be. … It is not a livable wage. Not even close.”
Rebecca Zajac has been a paraprofessional at Norman Public Schools for ten years. She works with lots of students throughout the day, pulling them from their classrooms to give them individualized attention.
She said last year, she made under $20,000. It was about $350 over the limit to qualify for SNAP benefits. But after some back and forth, she and her daughter qualified for $220 a month to help with groceries.
She said after bills, she has about $50 leftover per week for other expenses like gas or clothing. But because of inflation, she said that number has been closer to $20 lately. If she wants to get her daughter something special, she tucks away $5-10 a month.
“This career is so selfless, and I feel like the state takes that too far, ‘Well, this is a work of heart. It shouldn’t matter that you’re getting paid diddly squat,’” Zajac said. “But we deserve a livable wage.”
She said she recently had a conversation with a new paraprofessional at her district — who has left the job since — about what she should tell lawmakers about the work paraprofessionals do.
“I distinctly remember telling her, ‘If you ever have a chance to go to a legislator, bring your day-to-day schedule of what you’re supposed to do and add in every single time you are pulled to do something else and show them,’” Zajac said. “There are times where I don’t get to go to the bathroom for four or five hours. There are times where we are barely getting our lunch because this person’s out [for the day] or this student is having a moment and is a danger to himself or others.”
Though the legislature considers measures that can impact pay, like stipends or adding to the funding formula, support staff do not have a minimum salary schedule enshrined in state law like that of their certified counterparts.
Sen. Adam Pugh said there’s not an appetite among lawmakers to set pay rates for support staff.
“I want to respect the school’s flexibility here and recognize that what you’re paying someone in the Panhandle versus maybe an employee in downtown Tulsa, those cost of livings — even just regionally in our state — are so different,” Pugh said. “The labor markets are so different. I don’t necessarily want to get into the pay scale role here at the legislature.”
He said with the recent axing of the state’s grocery tax, he wasn’t willing to obligate a recurring expense, which is why his proposed stipend is a one-time expense. But, he said if the money is there next year, there could be another stipend.
Pugh said he’s frustrated that despite the legislature’s historic education funding last year, he hears from support staffers who say their pay increased by only a quarter an hour.
Some districts went further, like Tulsa Public Schools, which upped support staff pay by $2 an hour last year. That raise was championed by the local American Federation of Teachers union chapter. Then-superintendent Deborah Gist acknowledged it still didn’t go far enough.
“We know, of course, that we need to do more,” Gist said in a press release. “And we remain committed to working together to advocate for every member of our team until our public school system is funded in a way that provides the professional salaries and wages that every member of Team Tulsa needs and deserves.”
Besides the proposed stipend, Pugh hopes to increase support staff pay through another route — by freeing up certain buckets of money for districts to use as they need it.
Senate Bill 1258 by Pugh would move the requirement for the State Department of Education to approve the use of general funds for capital expenditures to local school boards. It passed the Senate and now heads to the House.
Senate Bill 1522 by Sen. Dewayne Pemberton (R-Muskogee) would allow redbud school grants to be used for the same purposes as a building fund. It passed the Senate Education Committee and can now be considered on the Senate Floor.
Senate Bill 1257 by Pugh removes limits on the amount of general fund carryover school districts can have and removes the penalties for exceeding those limits. It passed the Senate Education Committee and can now be considered on the Senate Floor.
“Schools have their hands tied to some degree for what they can do with those funds,” Pugh said. “If they want to do things like support staff pay, we want to give them maximum flexibility to do that. So I think when you couple all those things together, there may be some more money there for them to take care of support staff, but to do it of their own accord and based on what they think is the right thing to do for their employees, and not necessarily because of a mandate from the state.”
As for Bitson at Tulsa Public Schools, she’s going to continue doing the work she loves. But she has some advice for those considering getting into her line of work:
“If you’re doing it for the pay,” Bitson said, “Think again.”
