Pennsylvania’s public schools rely on tens of thousands of education support professionals, including paraprofessionals, bus drivers and aides, custodians, secretaries, maintenance employees, technology staff, and personal care assistants. Yet Pennsylvania lacks a comprehensive, publicly accessible source of statewide employment and compensation data for this critical workforce.

I plan to introduce legislation requiring school entities to report basic employment information for education support professionals to the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE), including job classification, wages, hours worked, years of service, date of hire, and employment status. PDE would make this information publicly available in a format similar to data already available for tens of thousands of professional staff members.

This information would help school entities and policymakers identify workforce trends and address staffing shortages in critical support positions. Compensation and employment data could inform recruitment and retention efforts, while years of service and hiring data could help identify potential future shortages. Furlough data would provide additional insight into staffing reductions and their potential impact on students, programs, and services.

Standardized statewide data would also provide a common factual foundation for labor-management discussions, giving school employers and employee representatives access to the same information when evaluating compensation trends and workforce needs.

This proposal relies on information school employers already maintain and directs PDE to use existing databases and reporting systems to the extent possible. It also advances a basic principle of government transparency: taxpayers and policymakers should have access to meaningful information about the publicly funded workforce serving Pennsylvania’s schools.

Please join me in cosponsoring this legislation to promote transparency, strengthen workforce planning, and provide a more complete picture of Pennsylvania’s public-school workforce.