A controversial bill to provide each New York City school paraprofessional with a $10,000 “workforce stabilization” payment — outside of collective bargaining — will go before the full City Council for a vote later this week, but Mayor Mamdani said Monday he has misgivings about the plan.
The proposed law has 47 co-sponsors, a veto-proof majority, and is expected to head to the Council for a Thursday vote. It is expected to cost around $244 million, according to a Council fiscal impact statement.
“This is the furthest this legislation has ever gone,” the United Federation of Teachers wrote on social media last Friday night, “but we know it’s not done until it’s signed into law.”
Mamdani, at an unrelated news conference Monday flanked by Councilwoman Carmen de la Rosa (D-Manhattan) — the lead sponsor and former chair of the labor committee — continued to cast doubt on pay raises outside of collective bargaining.
The Mamdani administration first expressed skepticism about the legislation in March at a Council hearing on an earlier revision of the bill. Labor officials cited a New York State statute known as the “Taylor Law,” which requires public employers to negotiate wages and other benefits through collective bargaining. The checks are one-time and not used to calculate pension benefits.
“Paraprofessionals are a critically important part of our workforce, and I appreciate the Councilwomen’s leadership on highlighting that,” Mamdani said in Brooklyn. “I do also believe that the conversations around compensation are ones to be had at the negotiating table, and that’ll continue.”
Mamdani supported the original paraprofessional check bill on the campaign trail, which would’ve had even greater implications for the city budget by tying annual checks to principal pay raises.
The scheduled vote was first reported by The City Reporter.
Theodore Parisienne, Barry Williams / New York Daily News
City Council Member Carmen de la Rosa, left, and Mayor Mamdani. (Theodore Parisienne, Barry Williams / New York Daily News)
The latest revision of the bill would authorize the supplemental payments as a one-year program, instead of recurring annual checks as envisioned in the first draft. The incentive would be broken down into four installments of $2,500 to be paid quarterly in 2027 over two fiscal years.
The Council can reauthorize the checks through future legislation, according to the UFT, though critics say there’s no statutory mechanism — or guarantee — of that. The law would be repealed if it is absorbed by a collective bargaining agreement that gives the special education teacher aides equal to or better than a $10,000 pay raise.
“Workforce stabilization payments are necessary to address (paraprofessional shortages) until these conditions are rectified through collective bargaining,” read the bill, “and the council will continue through its oversight function to monitor these conditions and address them as appropriate through potential legislative action.”
Council Speaker Julie Menin in an interview with the Daily News said she pushed to include the measure in the city budget, but Mayor Mamdani was unwilling to do so. She said her hope is for the one-time payments to advance into permanent salary raises that help address the paraprofessional shortage — a move that she believes will save the city money in future private special education costs.
“Not only is this the right thing to do,” said Menin, who headlined a UFT paraprofessionals lunch earlier this year. “It is also fiscally the right thing to do as well.”
The bill aims to address persistent paraprofessional shortages — a problem that disproportionately affects students with disabilities, who rely on teacher aides for one-on-one support, such as riding the bus to school or participating in their classes.
There are at least 1,600 paraprofessional vacancies across the city’s school system, according to the UFT — a rough tally the union believes is an undercount when considering the numbers of not only approved yet unfilled positions, but also students legally entitled to aides without them staffed.
The starting salary for a paraprofessional is just over $32,600 next school year, according to the UFT.
Marie Wausnock, a Staten Island paraprofessional and co-founder of the Fix Para Pay slate that ran against Mulgrew’s Unity caucus, is pushing the Council to postpone the vote because the payments do not figure into pensions and she believes a one-time payment will not fix the staffing shortage.
The legislation as it’s written also does not cover paraprofessionals who recently retired after many years of service as the measure stalled last year — a flaw she said should be fixed with a look-back period.
“It’s not the bill that was first introduced and dangled in front of paras,” Wausnock said. “This shows you they don’t care about paras. They believe paras are replaceable, disposable — that’s how they always looked at us.”