Ritu Chopra, executive director of the PARAprofessional Resource and Research Center at the University of Colorado Denver, said one of the biggest issues in the broader special education field is paraprofessionals’ lack of training and the fact that they are inadequately supervised by licensed teachers.
She said federal and state laws are lax on those fronts, leaving individual school districts with significant leeway in how they use and oversee paras.
“They are very important members of the team, but they are not teachers,” Chopra said. Too often, “Paras are being given too much responsibility beyond the scope of their legal and ethical role.”