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Ep #16: Sharing the Love: Why I Don't Use 1:1 Paraprofessionals
As a special educator, there are absolutely going to be times when having a one to one para is either necessary or inevitable within your department. I am not arguing the fact that some students need an adult with them all day for either safety reasons or due to behavior issues. Instead, I am challenging the scheduling aspect of assigning the same para to the same child all day, every day.
That's where I see a problem
I know I don’t need to tell you this, but our job is stressful.
And if it’s stressful to the highly qualified, appropriately trained, licensed teacher whose burnout rate averages at 10 years...imagine the stress level of someone who isn’t highly qualified, appropriately trained and licensed and who doesn’t make near the salary we do for basically the same work...someone who took this job because they most likely enjoy children and really had no idea what they were getting themselves into.
Once my co-teacher and I recognized the fact that burn-out was the leading cause of the high turnover rate we were having, we began “Sharing the love” as a way to retain our paras and grow our department.
Sharing the love is just a nice way of saying, we are all going to carry our weight as a staff to split up the responsibilities including the stress, behaviors, instruction and everything else that goes into working in this field.
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