Pasco to keep many classroom aides after pandemic relief expires
Pasco County school officials, responding to parent concerns, say they will save about a third of the kindergarten aides they hired using federal pandemic relief funds over the past three years.
They also plan to keep a similar number of student discipline assistants brought in during the same period at middle and high schools.
Those jobs had been in question, with the federal grants that paid for them running out this fall. The 250 kindergarten aides and 210 discipline assistants claimed about $15 million of the $201 million in pandemic relief that Pasco received.
Each person who got one of the jobs also received regular alerts reminding them their positions would go away when the grants expired. District officials said those whose slots are eliminated would have opportunities to find different work within the system.
“We’re still pretty confident that, at the end of the day, we will have something for everyone,” Assistant Superintendent Kevin Shibley said.
Several parents and teachers have urged the school board to keep all the aides. With the extra adults on hand, they said, students got much-needed academic attention and teachers received vital support when dealing with classroom situations and behavior issues.
“When y’all have the budget meetings later on ... please, please prioritize the (instructional assistants) in the classroom,” parent Angela Lee told the board in February. “Our schools really can’t function without them.”
Shibley said district leaders spent the following months looking for ways to make it happen. He noted the district has several priorities, including paying employee raises and opening a new school. That made for some tough budget decisions about staffing for the coming academic year, he said.
“We knew we were not going to be able to sustain all those positions with the end” of the federal funds, Shibley said. “We’re trying to salvage what we are able to, in terms of those school supports.”
He said initial budget projections will allow the district to set aside $6 million from the general fund. That amount should cover about 90 elementary instructional aides and 73 secondary discipline assistants.
The number is in addition to the aides schools had outside of the pandemic response. Before then, elementary schools had one instructional assistant for every nine teachers. The new plan calls for one aide to every six teachers.
Schools will be given latitude in how to use them. Some might decide to keep the aides in kindergarten classrooms, Shibley said, while others might decide they have different needs.
Schools also will have the opportunity to add more aides to their staff, if they have other resources such as federal Title I money that supports campuses serving high percentages of children in poverty.
School board chairperson Megan Harding, a former third grade teacher, said she was pleased with the solution administrators devised.
Harding recalled how valuable it was to have an aide in her classroom, and said she would love for the district to keep all of them. “But it’s millions of dollars,” she said. “The board directed them to make it work. I’m really grateful he was able to look at the budget and make it work.”
Parent Jessica Silber, whose child will enter kindergarten in the fall, said she had lingering concerns.
As a special education advocate, she said she worried that the aides who remain will not be used in a way that benefits all students. She said the district needs to keep looking for ways to trim less valuable expenses from its budget so it can direct more to supports like the aides.
She said the need could be great for incoming kindergartners who spent their second year of existence “in lockdown, when they should have been socializing with other kids.”
Without the aides, teachers doing the jobs of two adults could be stretched too far, Silber added.
Shibley said the district will continue to work through the summer on staffing.
