(Radio Iowa) – A legislative committee has approved emergency rules that will let Iowa school districts continue to use paraeducators hired to work with individual students as substitute teachers in any classroom. The action was necessary as the governor’s public health emergency proclamation which had allowed paraeducators to be subs during the pandemic expires at midnight. The committee is also proposing legislation directing schools to make a good faith effort to find substitute teachers and ending the policy after this school year is over. Representative Megan Jones, a Republican from Sioux Rapids, is the bill’s sponsor. “We don’t want enterprising folks thinking that we should put less qualified people into a classroom and use a para because we can pay them $12 an hour,” Jones says.

Jones also blasted the Board of Educational Examiners for holding a meeting yesterday (Monday) at 7:30 a.m. to reveal its solution to the problem, as that limited the public’s ability to review the regulations that already have been approved 24 hours later. “This process has been very ugly,” Jones said. “…It makes me sick to think of eliminating all of this public notice.”
The executive director of the Board of Educational Examiners says state officials do not know how many paraeducators are employed in Iowa schools. The board’s emergency rule requires schools to ask for waivers when paraeducators are taken away from their main jobs to substitute teach in another classroom. Emily Piper, of the Iowa Association of School Boards, says that’s important “We do share concerns about this being a permanent soluation,” Piper says. “We don’t think this is the answer, long-term, to our sub shortages.”

Melissa Peterson, a lobbyist for the Iowa State Education Association, says there are paraeducator shortages as well.  “These are folks who provide services to some of our most needy and vulnerable students,” Peterson says. Senator Rob Hogg, a Democrat from Cedar Rapids, blasted the governor for letting her public health emergency expire and creating this dilemma in schools that required this scramble to ensure paraeducators can continue to be assigned to substitute teach tomorrow (Wednesday). “This is the failure of the governor’s office to put us in this position. That has to be said today,” Hogg says. “This was totally foreseeable that something like this would happen.”

Hogg’s wife is the media secretary at a Cedar Rapids school, but she’s also a former paraeducator and Hogg says she’s often been assigned to lead a classroom as a substitute teacher over the past two years.