Connecticut opened registration last week for the Paraeducator Preparation Academy, a free six-week training course the state says will address hundreds of unfilled positions in public schools. The program trains people for jobs the federal government has been promising to fund for half a century and has never once delivered on.
As of February, there were 909 unfilled paraeducator positions across Connecticut public schools — 772 in special education, 137 everywhere else. The academy aims to train 200 to 250 new paras in its first year. If it hits the upper bound, Connecticut will still have more than 650 vacant special education para positions. The gap is not a training problem. It is a wages problem. Paraeducators in Connecticut typically earn between roughly $16 and $21 an hour, depending on district and role. At $16 an hour, a full-time para earns roughly $33,000 a year before taxes — and takes home closer to $26,000 after estimated federal and state withholding. That is less than $2,200 a month. Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Connecticut exceeds $1,900. A para earning $16 an hour spends more than 85 percent of take-home pay on housing alone, before groceries, childcare, or the student loan payment that follows half the people in this generation into their thirties. Free tuition does not fix a wages crisis. The California teacher apprenticeship program tried the same move two months ago — training pipeline as the answer to a staffing shortage — and the structural diagnosis there is the same: you cannot train people into a job they cannot afford to hold. State officials describe the academy as their answer to a staffing crisis. The answer is not enough.
The federal government enacted the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975. The promise was explicit: public schools must serve every child with a disability, and the federal government would fund 40 percent of the cost. Every state that operates a special education program — including Connecticut, which serves roughly 95,000 children with disabilities — built its staffing plan around that promise. In fifty years, the federal government has never once delivered. The closest it came was approximately 18 percent in 2004 through 2006. The annual shortfall nationwide is estimated at $24 billion — a figure some congressional analyses now place closer to $39 billion for the most recent school year. That is not a rounding error. It is a structural choice, renewed every appropriations cycle, to mandate a service and refuse to pay for it. Connecticut cannot fill 772 special education para positions because the federal government that mandated those positions has never funded them at the level it promised. The money comes from somewhere else in the state and local budget — or it does not come at all. Every child in those 772 classrooms whose para would have kept them in general education — every one of them is waiting because Congress has a bill it has refused to pay for fifty years.
There is a line that lands here — I just wanted you to know that this is me trying. Paraeducators do the work of inclusion: small-group instruction, reteaching, walking a child between classrooms, staying beside a student with behavioral needs all day so that child can learn alongside peers instead of being sent somewhere more isolated. The work is essential. It is the infrastructure of the classroom. And the state’s response to a chronic shortage of people willing to do that work for wages that do not cover rent is a free six-week course. Catholic Social Teaching is specific on this point. Rerum Novarum states that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. The principle is not complicated: a worker deserves a living wage, not instruction on how to accept a non-living one. What Connecticut built is a training pathway into positions the federal government was supposed to fund and the state cannot pay for at a level anyone can live on. The paras who are already in those classrooms — showing up every day, doing the work of keeping children included, earning wages that do not cover rent — deserve more than a six-week thank-you note. They deserve a paycheck that lets them stay.