When thinking about supporting our local schools, one often-overlooked group of invaluable professionals is the paraeducators who support our most vulnerable students.
Under the supervision of certified teachers, they work day after day to instruct, monitor and bring out the potential in students who struggle with physical and mental difficulties, enabling them to participate in the life of our schools.
Yet the 130 paraeducators in the Port Angles School District have been working since August without a contract.
And the school district has failed to pass along to them a 3.7 percent cost-of-living pay increase that the state Legislature funded last year and the district received specifically for paraeducators and those employees who support them.
Senate Bill 5882 included about $72 million in additional funding to support paraeducators and support staff, to be allocated to Washington schools in the 2023-24 school year.
Where is our school district’s share of that money?
Why have paraeducators not received the COLA that was intended for them?
Katherine Kennedy
Mount Pleasant