Sept. 20, 2023 - Nearly half of all paraprofessionals want to become full-time teachers, and with a teacher shortage already reaching crisis-levels and many expected to retire, paraprofessionals are coming to the forefront as the most promising group to cultivate to help fill the void left by departing teachers.
For paraprofessionals, it’s a matter of finding the right program and school, identifying how long it will take, how much it will cost, whether or not they will need to take on student debt, and ways to keep working while earning their credentials.
These discussions came full circle and into focus as the CWDC partnered with Trailhead Strategies and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation to implement a five-session Talent Finance Design Workshop (TFDW) that ran from April to June 2023.
The workshop tasked participants to explore and develop new financial models that could enable more Coloradans—like paraprofessionals—to access education and training that results in employment in high-demand sectors.
“What I treasured the most about the workshop is that it questioned my own premises and my own ideas about how the world works - particularly when it comes to funding higher education,” said Western Colorado University (WCU) Director of Adult Degree Completion Dr. Terry Schliesman.
Dr. Terry Schliesman and WCU Director of Educator Preparation Sherri Anderson attended the workshop to serve as representatives from higher education. Other workshop participants included a cross-section of employers, community-based organizations, workforce centers, and training providers.
“When you are exposed to different environments, with different people that you wouldn’t naturally go to, I think that it inspires innovation,” Anderson said.
Identifying the Problem and Solution
Dr. Schliesman and Anderson identified their “why” or purpose of participating in the workshop was to identify solutions to a teacher shortage that continues to threaten the ability of Colorado to educate its youth, specifically K-12 students.
As they explored solutions, one option was to reduce the required credentials in order to fast-track paraprofessionals to licensed teachers. But as Anderson explains, “I’m not convinced that you should be a teacher without a bachelor’s degree….I’m not convinced that lowering the bar is the right answer.”
Paraprofessionals Can Become Teachers
Dr. Schliesman and Anderson believe the best solution is in creating the pathway to a bachelor’s degree, particularly for the many paraprofessionals already working in Colorado’s K-12 schools.
“When we’re trying to meet the state need and create sustainable pipelines of people, paraprofessionals are a really natural place for districts to look because they already live in those communities. They already work in those schools, and a lot of times, they are able to sort of step into those roles in a seamless way,” Anderson explains.
Barriers to Employment for Paraprofessionals: Credentials, Student Debt, and Life
Many paraprofessionals do not have a bachelor’s degree. “At this point, paraprofessionals are typically in their late 20s, 30s - even 40s - and so they have some financial obligations. They have families. They have lives,” Anderson adds.
Dr. Schliesman points out how the realities of their students forced them to rethink their funding models. “Higher ed’s mainstay has been grants, as well as tuition and fees, which is the financial risk on the student’s shoulders. What we’re finding is that adult learners, as they’re transitioning their careers, have families, mortgages, and everything else to manage. Expecting them to come up with $20,000 to $25,000 to $30,000 to complete their degrees is not realistic. So this workshop series has really taught us about questioning the whole idea that the student should be the number one payer in this model.”
“We believe the student should be invested and should pay something, but to the extent that we can offset 70-to-80-percent of those costs, those are our objectives today and that’s what we work with at WCU for a model for these paraprofessionals,” Dr. Schliesman said.
In terms of funding, Dr. Schliesman explains that while grants are very promising, they are also extremely time-consuming and often come with a lot of strings attached. They also have end dates.
WCU currently has a Colorado Opportunity Scholarship (COSI) grant that will end in a few years. As a result, “We’re particularly motivated to uphold the amount of support that we’ve been providing to these paraprofessionals by finding a replacement for COSI,” says Dr. Schliesman.
Talent Design Workshop: Earn to Learn Opportunities for Paraprofessionals
Through the TFDW, Dr. Schliesman and Anderson were introduced to service providers in the space - Sunny Day Fund, Earn to Learn, Social Finance, and FundingU, among others - that could help them develop a financing model that would lower the financial barrier of a paraprofessional pursuing their bachelor’s degree. It also helped them to define all the elements involved in an ask to funders.
Dr. Schliesman and Anderson say the TFDW taught them to consider how other organizations think about solving these problems as opposed to, “How does higher education solve this problem?”
“You gotta get outside how you think about how it operates, and this is what the workshop series did for us. It put us into a group - literally into a room with folks who are not in higher education, they’re not looking to hold a career in higher education, they have much different objectives as organizations and think about this world very differently than maybe Anderson and I do - but we learned a lot from people who were also concerned about workforce advancement,” says Dr. Schliesman.
The Result
Dr. Schliesman and Anderson expressed excitement in having some actionable steps. “We’re really excited about the partnership we’re setting up using an earn and learn model.”
Earn to Learn is a revolutionary, multi-investor "Savings to Scholarship" program that empowers low- to moderate-income students to successfully complete college with little to no debt. This is achieved through matched-savings scholarships, financial capability education, success coaching, and workforce development.
The Earn to Learn partnership is special because, as Dr. Schliesman explains, “We’re part of their pilot program for Colorado, and that’s because of the Talent Finance Design Workshop.”
The CWDC is excited to support projects like WCU’s talent finance design because it increases access to training and education that lead to employment in high-demand occupations.
More information on Western Colorado University’s focus on adult education can be found at western.edu/adc.
If you’re interested in exploring the use of talent finance to increase access to training for Coloradans, please contact Jessica Maiorca, Innovative Financing Consultant at CWDC, at jessica.maiorca@state.co.us.