The people who can fix CT’s paraeducator shortage are already in our schools

On a Monday evening in August, 25 adults sat down at folding tables in a community center in East Hartford, opened laptops, and began preparing for the exam that would qualify them to work as paraeducators in Connecticut’s public schools. Most had already worked a full day. The room was not a lecture hall. It has a mirrored wall and a wooden floor, and on other nights it is used for other things.

That room is the point.

Connecticut has a paraeducator shortage, and it is not an abstraction. As of August, districts across the state reported 2,537 unfilled paraeducator positions. Against that, they reported roughly 330 special education teacher vacancies. The students who feel the gap first are the ones who need the most support: children with disabilities, multilingual learners, and students who need an adult beside them to get through the day.

Shuana K. Tucker, Ph.D., chief talent officer at the Connecticut State Department of Education, calls it a critical workforce challenge — one that in many districts, she says, “has become even more acute than the shortage of certified teachers.”

What Connecticut does not have is a shortage of willing people. There is no shortage of adults who want this work and would be extraordinary at it — parents who have volunteered in their children’s schools for years, bus monitors and cafeteria staff who already know every student’s name, immigrants who taught school abroad and cannot afford the years it would take to re-credential here.

What stands between those adults and a classroom is not ambition. It is design.

The conventional route into education makes assumptions about the person taking it: that they can stop working; that they can pay tuition and exam fees long before they earn anything back; that they can travel to a campus on the campus’s schedule; and that they can do all of it in English. Each of those assumptions filters people out, and it filters out the least accommodated rather than the least qualified.

Connecticut’s first Paraeducator Preparation Academy was built to take those filters down one at a time. Sessions run in the evening, after work. Exam costs are covered, so no one has to gamble a paycheck on a test. Instruction is available in Spanish as well as English. And the Academy meets in a community center participants already know, in a neighborhood where they already live, rather than on a campus that would require an hour of driving and an arrangement for childcare.

None of this lowers a standard. Everyone sits the same state-adopted ParaPathways assessment at the end, scored the same way. What changes is who gets to attempt it.

Nor does the work stop at the exam. A pathway that delivers people into a job they cannot manage to keep is not a pipeline; it is a revolving door. So the Academy pairs entry with retention: paraeducators who are newly hired into a district are matched with experienced ones who can help them navigate the role and feel connected to a school community rather than dropped into one.

That second half is what most workforce programs skip. Tucker says the state built it in deliberately: retention begins the day someone walks into a district, not the day they finish training.

The Academy also shows something about how the state can work. The Connecticut State Department of Education sets the standard, adopts the assessment, and holds the accountability that make the training mean something. A community-based partner brings the building, the relationships, and the ability to fill 25 seats with the right 25 people — because recruitment here means knowing who has been waiting for exactly this and telling them in person. The Alliance for Connecticut Charter Schools serves as a facility and recruitment partner under a memorandum of understanding with the Department.

Neither institution could have done this alone. A state agency cannot procure community trust. A community organization cannot set a statewide standard.

The first cohort finishes on September 23 and sits the ParaPathways exam this month. Success will not be measured on either day. It will be measured when these 25 pass, secure positions in Connecticut districts, and are still in them a year later with a mentor beside them. The goal, as Tucker puts it, is not simply to recruit more paraeducators but to help them “remain in the profession, and see education as a career in which they can grow and thrive.”

We would not want a reader to take from this that a problem has been solved. Twenty-five people against 2,537 vacancies is not a workforce strategy. It is a proof of concept — and it worked well enough to run again. New sessions open in Bridgeport and Norwich in October, with more locations planned for the spring, including through adult education programs.

The remaining question is whether this stays a sequence of sessions or becomes something Connecticut can count on — funded, scheduled, and sized to the gap it is meant to close. Twenty-five at a time will not get to 2,537.

We already know who will show up. They showed up on a Monday night in August, after work, with laptops.

Maria Matos is the chief advocacy officer of the Alliance for Connecticut Charter Schools.