Lexington Public Schools’ paraprofessionals ask for better pay and respect in next contract

Eight months on, Lexington Public School’s Unit C employees continue to negotiate their contracts for the current school year with the School Committee and administration.

Unit C employees are a segment of the Lexington Education Association, or LEA, who work as specialized instructional assistants. Many are part-time employees who work one-on-one with students who have disabilities or behavioral issues. They help those students with social emotional challenges in the classroom and manage their curriculum. 

Fifteen members of LEA, including Robin Strizhak, LEA’s president, Amanda Laskowski, the Association’s vice president, and 13 Unit C employees, are asking for higher pay, better professional development, and more respect in Unit C employees’ new contracts to help improve working conditions and employee retention. 

“Educators are leaving the field in droves. Something has to change,” Strizhak told LexObserver. “We need to do something different — it cannot be business as usual anymore.”

According to their old contracts, Unit C employees made between $28.08 and $40.75 per hour in the 2023 to 2024 school year, depending on how long they’d been working at LPS. In theory, Unit C employees move up a 12-step pay scale each year, but that’s often not the case, John Goodwin, a Unit C employee at Jonas Clarke Middle School, told LexObserver.  

“Even though I’ve been here for 15 years, I’m only on step eight,” he said. “Lexington will often take that [$40.75 per hour] and be like, ‘look at how awesome our rates are,’ but what they don’t tell you is that no one in the district works at step 12.”

Some Unit C employees need to have second jobs because their pay is not commensurate with a livable wage today, Goodwin, who is also helping negotiate Unit C contracts, said.  

“Our kids deserve people who can give them the full-time effort but the district’s not willing to compensate that way,” he said.
”They want the full-time effort without the full-time pay.” 

The unit has a high turnover rate for the same reason. Strizhak worries more and more Unit C employees will quit because they can’t justify the low pay with the cost of living continuing to increase. 

“You can’t have an excellent special education program and be proud of it and do right by kids but then also refuse to pay,” she argued. 

Contract negotiators are asking to eliminate two of the 12 steps on the pay scale so Unit C employees can see increases to their wages quicker.

Negotiators are also asking for a culture shift because they feel they are not treated with the same respect as full-time teachers. For example, teachers and administration often have meetings where they discuss how to best work with the students who Unit C employees work with one-on-one, but the paraprofessionals aren’t invited to those meetings. 

“I’m the person who spends all day with this student, I’m the person who is going to be executing and delivering all the strategies that are being talked about in this meeting, and if my performance is an issue, it’s probably coming up in this meeting, but I’m not invited,” Goodwin said. “Everyone gets to talk about the work I do but I’m not even going to be there.”

And that work has evolved and expanded over time. Students with certain disabilities used to be trained to do basic jobs such as working at a supermarket, but today, students with extra needs are learning advanced subjects with the help of paraprofessionals.

“I’m probably fluent enough to teach any class in any subject at Clark at this point and I have to be able to do that because at any point, I could have to take my kid and teach them the whole thing independently somewhere else,” Goodwin said. “It’s just a very different job than it used to be.”

Sam Johnston, a Lexington parent who has a fifth-grade daughter with Down syndrome and a reading disability, said her daughter has excelled into taking general education classes thanks to the support of LPS’s special education services, including Unit C employees.

“She loves them,” she said. “They’re essential to her learning, they’re incredibly professional, incredibly flexible, great problem solvers, and work incredibly hard.”

Nonetheless, there is a stigma surrounding paraprofessionals throughout LPS. They are seen as the “JV” employees who are there to “learn the ropes of how to be a real teacher,” Goodwin said. But that is not the case for many Unit C employees, such as Goodwin, who has worked as a paraprofessional in Lexington for a decade and a half. 

“Instead of one being the junior job and one being the senior job, one of my goals and something that I’m really hoping we can push toward is a cultural shift of thinking, ‘we are both educators and these are parallel positions,’” he said. “We’re both important and we’re both necessary.” 

“There are people who are in it for the duration and this is what they want to do with their lives,” Strizhak said. “Telling them this is entry level or a stepping stone or saying, ‘let’s make sure you can all get to Unit A’ — there are many who don’t want to and that should be okay.”

Johnston, who is also the co-char of Lexington’s Special Education Parent Advisory Council, or LexSEPAC, said that having her daughter work with the same paraprofessionals for many years has contributed to her educational growth.

“A lot of [LPS’s paraprofessionals] have been able to know my daughter over a number of years and that’s been really critical in knowing her, understanding her and what makes her tick, and being able to see her growth,” she said.

Unit C negotiators are also seeking more robust professional development resources in their new contracts, such as trauma, de-escalation, and CPR trainings.

Goodwin argued that Unit C employees deserve these updates in their new contracts because of the value they provide the town. By employing and sustaining paraprofessionals, especially those who have years of experience, Lexington can keep students who need more support in-district, he said.  

Lexington spent approximately $7 million after receiving about the same amount in federal and state funding on sending students out-of-district in fiscal year 2024, David Coelho, LPS’s assistant superintendent for finance and operations, told LexObserver. That $7 million is paid for by Lexington residents. 

“The more experience you have, the better you can work with these kids, which means the tougher kids can stay,” Goodwin said. “But the problem is that [hardly anybody] in the district stays long enough to do that.”

Strizhak said she does not know when Unit C’s new contracts will be finalized, but she is hopeful a compromise will be made. 

“Our Unit C members do incredible work, and our school system is what it is because of them,” Julie Hackett, superintendent of LPS, told LexObserver in a statement. “While we can’t solve every challenge or satisfy every ask in one bargaining year, we can make progress. Everyone on the bargaining team is working hard and I’m optimistic that we’ll get there.”  

“The School Committee is grateful to the Lexington Education Association for engaging with us in a collaborative process as we work toward a Unit C contract,” Eileen Jay, chair of the School Committee told LexObserver in a statement. “We appreciate their ongoing, continued collaboration.”

Until Unit C employees’ new contracts are finalized, the district’s paraprofessionals will continue to work under the conditions of their old contract.

“As one parent told me, Unit C is a lifeline — they are the ones who make sure kids’ behavior plans are happening, data is being taken, and the kids feel safe,” Strizhak said. “They are invaluable.”