Special Ed Paras Fired

Shortly after the Branford school system’s paraprofessionals voted to unionize last month, three special education paraprofessionals, two with long seniority, were abruptly fired from their jobs at the Mary Murphy Elementary School. 

“There is no just cause here for these firings,” said. Annie MacDonald, a field organizer for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, Local 222 of the Independent Labor and Police Union. The Branford paraprofessionals and teachers aides joined the local after a campaign this year to achieve a more secure workplace. 
 

MacDonald spoke at a meeting at the home of Pam Van Winkle, one of the union organizers and a literacy paraprofessional at Murphy. Van Winkle, a veteran volunteer in the school system, was inducted into the Branford Educational Hall of Fame in 2002 in recognition of her volunteer work. She said the paraprofessionals were the last of the school employees to unionize and acted with great speed to do so. 

MacDonald said the union formed in two months, a record time, because the circumstances the paraprofessionals faced were serious. She told the group she plans to meet with schools superintendent Hamlet Hernandez about the process used in the recent firings.

The three women who were fired, along with MacDonald and several others, attended a recent meeting at Van Winkle’s Branford home. Sitting around the kitchen table, one of the women said: ​“You can come to work today and you can be gone at 2 p.m. Even if you have worked for the school system for 26 years, you are gone. That’s it.” 

The union election was held before the three women were fired. In all the contract will cover 139 employees — once a contract is reached. MacDonald said she hopes negotiations with the school system will start this fall and that a contract will be in hand by June, 2012.

Frank Carrano, the chair of the Board of Education, told the Eagle ​“a number of reductions were embedded into the original budget proposal and those reductions were not changed in any way when we finalized our 2011 – 2012 budget.” He speculated that one of the reasons the group joined a union was because they heard positions were to be cut. Most in the school system had heard of cuts for months. The prime concern for this group, they said, was that cuts be based on seniority and evaluations. 

None of the women said openly that their firing resulted from union activity. Only one was a direct and overt union organizer. But all of them said they viewed the formation of the union, its vote and the subsequent firings as a related series of events.

The paraprofessionals’ principal said the pink slips had to do with a decline in special ed students, not union activity. He said he didn’t know of the one fired para’s union activities.

MacDonald’s immediate concern, she told the group assembled in the Van Winkle kitchen, is the lay-off process used by Mary Murphy Principal Anthony Buono. MacDonald said she is also gathering information about potential layoffs at Mary Tisko Elementary School and the John B. Sliney Elementary School. Early information indicated the situation at these elementary schools was less serious than at Murphy. Cindy Ewing, a paraprofessional from Walsh Intermediate School, also attended the meeting. 

In a wide-ranging interview with the Eagle, the three women recently fired said seniority counted for nothing and performance evaluations did not take place. Principal Buono confirmed in a later telephone interview that seniority was not necessarily a factor and that performance evaluations had not occurred for the past three years.

“There have not been any formal evaluations,” he confirmed. ​“That is accurate.”

Asked how he makes a decision about who stays and who goes without formal evaluations, Buono told the Eagle: ​“It is a difficult situation, unfortunately. And we would keep all of the people, to be quite frank. It’s just that we don’t have the positions so we had to make some difficult decisions.” He said fewer special education students will attend the school in the fall; more will move on to the intermediate school. 

He said the decision on who stays and who goes is made by his special education team. The team discusses ​“who we thought would be the best fit” with the student as well ​“as other factors.” 

One of the senior paraprofessionals, a woman who has worked at Murphy for 26 years and did not want her name published, said she had received ​“no warning.” She said she would take any job because she needs her medical benefits. None was offered. She noted that other paraprofessionals hired only recently were kept on the job while longer serving aides were not. Union contracts typically protect seniority with the last hired to be the first fired. 

Betsy R., who has worked as a paraprofessional at Murphy for the last 12 years, was a key and vocal union organizer, a fact that Buono said he knew nothing about. 

“Seniority meant nothing,” she said. ​“An evaluation meant nothing since we didn’t have them.” She said the decision on who was staying was ​“his and his alone,” she said of Buono, Buono told the Eagle that he worked with a team in making these decisions. The team included the special education teachers and others he did not identify. 

Betsy R. says she earns $13.99 an hour. She said that ​“there were people with less seniority than those laid off who have been kept on the job.”

The youngest teacher laid off was Melissa F., who lives in Milford and has been a special education paraprofessional for six years. She said Buono told her he has no job for her next year. She said the child she took care of had one more year at Murphy and his mother was distressed to hear she was leaving. 

“When you leave in June you don’t know if you are going to have a job or what your pay is going to be,” Melissa said.

Her grandmother, Barbara L. Lambert, a former state representative from Milford, attended the meeting. She said she felt the longest serving paraprofessionals who were fired were ​“discriminated against. They were targeted. There is no basis for the firing because there is no evaluation. I think there is an age discrimination issue here too. We want the public to realize that someone has devoted 26 of their lives to their children and now is being turned out to pasture on the whim of a principal. That is exactly what happened. This is horrible.”

Buono told the Eagle that the special education paras were reduced because there was a decrease in the number of special education children coming to Murphy next fall. ​“Yes, we have a decrease. We have a lot of students that have left us because they moved out of district or they moved on to the middle school.”

As for seniority, and the decision to keep younger paraprofessionals, Buono said that seniority is only one of several considerations. ​“But we consider a number of things. The main consideration is that we look to see who will be the best fit for some of the students or for people who are willing to do some of the duties required for that position. For the special needs students it does vary quite a bit.”

Job security is a major issue. Most paraprofessionals do not know when the school term ends if they will have a job next year, they said.

A ​“Para Survey” became another hot topic at the Mary Murphy school. Buono had the survey sent to all special education paraprofessionals to be filled out but MacDonald told them not to do so. One question that the paras said was ambiguous asked: ​“Are you able/willing to lift a student that requires lifting in the course of the day?” Another question asked: ​“Are you willing to toilet a child that requires toileting assistance (also may involve lifting?)” How heavy the students might be was not stated. 

The three special education paraprofessionals who were fired did not fill out the survey. But some who were told their jobs were safe did not answer the survey’s questions either. 
 
Buono said he sent out the para survey because ​“in the past people said they didn’t want to work at certain grade levels or they didn’t want to work with students with certain disabilities. I just wanted to clarify that.”

What most special education paraprofessionals have come to understand is that nothing is written in stone. Come September, when school re-opens, there may be ten new special education students waiting to get in. Not all special education students require paraprofessional support, Buono said. But if some do, ​“we would hire people for those positions.” He did not say he would rehire those just fired.

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