The Newly Revised UFT Para Bill: The Promise That Kept Shrinking
How the UFT sold a permanent para pay index that would seek to offset pattern bargaining—and ended up with a temporary one-year payment. And only if it passes or survives legal challenges at all.
There is a paraprofessional in Queens who probably still has one of those old union flyers from last year’s UFT election tucked inside a kitchen drawer.
Not because she saves campaign literature.
Because she saves hope.
Hope is expensive when you make barely enough to live in New York City.
She remembers what she was told.
Not that she might get a temporary, “one and done” bonus.
Not that City Hall might help for a year.
She was told the union had finally found a way to undo decades of pattern bargaining.
A permanently recurring payment. A Para Pay Index.
A new formula that would finally stop paraprofessionals from falling farther behind every contract. A payment tied to the widening gap between the highest-paid principals and the lowest-paid paras. A payment that would grow as the inequity grew.
It sounded less like just a supplemental check.
More like justice for decades of working without a living wage that keeps up with the runaway cost of living in New York City.
It sounded like somebody had finally looked around the school building and realized the people changing diapers, building one-on-one relationships with students, helping them communicate, preventing meltdowns, feeding children, escorting wheelchairs and protecting kids every single day deserved more than another speech about appreciation, acrylic trophies or paper certificates.
Then something funny happened between wearing blue at school to show solidarity and on the way to City Hall.
The legislation kept changing.
Not once.
Twice.
Then three times.
And every time it came back, it was a little smaller than the initial promise.
The first bill proposed and rolled out during the 2025 UFT election campaign created a Para Pay Index.
Gone.
The formula that adjusted with growing inequity.
Gone.
The permanent recurring concept that members were sold.
Gone.
Instead came a new phase with the 2026 version of the para bill.
Workforce stabilization.
Politicians love words like stabilization. They’re temporary by design.They’re what you use when you don’t want to admit you’re not fixing the foundation.
But then came the latest rewrite.
And that’s where the story really changes.
Read the latest amended bill (692-A), just introduced yesterday.
Not the colorful UFT Facebook graphics. Not the tweets.
Not the campaign slogans and cleverly worded talking points handed to Mulgrew’s Unity-UFT patronage machine and its highly paid talking head pundits.
Read the actual legislation.
The newest version no longer creates an ongoing payment system.
It defines an eligible paraprofessional as someone employed during the 2026-2027 school year.
It schedules exactly four payments tied to this upcoming school year.
January.
March.
June.
August.
That’s what the law says.
Now compare that with what leadership is saying.
The union now tells members that payments may be reauthorized each year if shortages continue.
May?
That word appears in union messaging. But not in any mechanism within the bill itself.
The legislation contains no annual renewal process.
No mechanisms for automatic extension.
No continuing Para Pay Index.
No guarantee that another payment exists after August 2027.
If paraprofessionals are ever going to receive another year’s payments, someone will have to draft another bill.
Introduce another bill.
Move another bill through committee. Organize again for more hearings.
More days that we all wear solidarity blue.
Get other council members’ signatures. Try to pass another bill.
And repeat the process all over again.
Every.
Single.
Year.
The original promise offered some permanence.
The current legislation is one school year.
That’s not a tweak. That’s a transformation to something different entirely.
Leadership will undoubtedly say politics required compromise and concessions.
Maybe.
City Council lawyers and OLR undoubtedly examined every word.
They always do.
But members should still ask a simple question.
Why weren’t they told how dramatically the promise had changed?
Because this wasn’t marketed as a temporary bridge to carry paras through next school year in an ongoing affordability crisis — with the hope that the next contract will finally provide a living wage to paraprofessionals. Another Mulgrew IOU of sorts.
It was originally marketed as a recurring respect check that would supplement pay until collective bargaining could chip away at the big pay gap that exists for New York City’s paraprofessional.
It wasn’t sold as one year’s stabilization payment. It was sold as correcting decades of injustice.
There’s another part of this story that’s impossible to ignore.
Before any of this legislation existed, UFT leadership negotiated our last contract containing roughly $450 million in recurring non-pensionable retention money.
Leadership had discretion over how to distribute those dollars.
They could have concentrated resources on the city’s most underpaid title, equitably.
They chose instead to spread the money broadly across all titles, equally.
Lest we forget that with each negotiated contract during the last couple of decades that gave equal raises across the board, we were told there is nothing that can be done to reverse the inequity because of pattern bargaining.
We were told to be grateful, we have it better off than others and this was “the best we could do”.
Today we’re told legislation is the only realistic path to hoping for a better contract in the future. Even as our out-of-pocket expenses increase with higher copays and deductibles as a result of their negotiated “healthcare cost savings”.
Members have every right to wonder why that wasn’t true when the bargaining table offered opportunities to permanently lift the people who needed it most.
But, you know what? None of this means paraprofessionals shouldn’t support this bill.
They absolutely should because it’s the best Unity can do, for better or worse. Even if this non-pensionable check barely moves the needle to a sustainable living wage.
They simply have proven, time and time again, that they don’t have the skillset, organizing prowess or negotiating wherewithal to bring this to where it belongs: The contract bargaining table.
Ten thousand dollars matters, right now, when our sub-inflation 3% raises can’t keep up with cost of living in the the New York area — which currently sits at a 5.1% inflation rate.
Every dollar matters when so many of us are living paycheck to paycheck.
Every paraprofessional has earned far more than this city has ever paid them.
But supporting the bill shouldn’t require pretending it is still the bill that was first promised.
The legislation evolved, or some mights say, de-evolved. The union’s “Respect Check” sales pitch didn’t.
Somewhere between the UFT election campaign and the lawyer’s red pen, “permanently recurring” became “one school year.”
Somewhere along the way, after “fixing para pay” and “closing the pay gap'“, the respect check became “stabilization” for the 2026-2027 school year and yet more promises for the future.
Somewhere along the way, a semi-permanent solution became a bill that, if paraprofessionals are fortunate enough to receive another RESPECT check after 2027, will require politicians to start the legislative process all over again.
Questions still remain about this newly amended bill:
Why are there fewer co-sponsors attached to it? What happens if the mayor doesn’t sign it? Fewer sponsors jeopardizes the tenuous claim that it’s “veto-proof.”
What happens if the city does what it almost always does — challenges the matter in court? Maybe saying it goes against the Taylor Law? The irony.
The bottom line: The people who spend their days helping children find their voices deserve better than having to wonder each year whether City Hall will remember theirs.
That’s not respect. That’s just hope.
And hope, as every paraprofessional already knows, doesn’t pay the rent, pay for groceries or fill up our gas tanks.
Related links:
Mulgrew had $450m in his hands to pay paras more and he chose not to! -- With no real plan to FIX PARA PAY, he and his Unity Caucus shift blame to pattern bargaining.
We never get to see the costing summary sheets of city union contracts with the City… but here is UFT ’s last one. And what it reveals is pretty alarming.
This new change is beyond disgusting. A false bill of goods has been presented. A total myth.
For far too long, paraprofessionals have had to live in the shadows with subpar wages that does not keep up with the cost of inflation.
For far too long, paraprofessionals have had to have two or three jobs just to make ends meet.
For far too long, we have felt the inequity and unjust treatment from the UFT leadership.
Michael Mulgrew is the spin Doctor , he shamelessly said that this $10,000 would be in perpetuity and it would be increasing every year for paraprofessionals. That was during the election campaign last year..
Many of us swallowed, his lies, hook ,line, and sinker.
I too have hope but the hope is not in Michael Mulgrew or in unity doing what is right by paraprofessionals. I will not stop fighting for paraprofessionals..
I have many colleagues in unity and though they do not agree with Mulgrew’s they are afraid of losing their salaries. Or if they speak out the risk getting fired..
Any money in the pockets of paraprofessionals as well deserved, but this is not the solution.