CHICAGO -- For years, Maria Johnson slipped into Chicago Public Schools classrooms as a volunteer parent, an extra set of hands to help students sound out their reading. She can’t recall exactly when she started: Her eldest son is now 22.

“I was not only trying to be there for my son, but I wanted to be there for other children, because I know everybody doesn’t get that,” Johnson said.

She had no intention of stopping. Then, last fall, a nonprofit offered to help turn that commitment into a career — with free classes and one-on-one coaching toward a license as a paid paraprofessional. Seven months later, she was hired as a special education classroom assistant, or SECA, at Benjamin E. Mays Academy in Englewood.

Johnson, 53, already held a college degree, but hadn’t been a student herself for more than three decades. “I just felt like that was God opening up a door for me to have a career,” she said.

Ladders of Opportunity is a relatively new statewide nonprofit working to address Illinois’ chronic shortage of paraprofessionals. It grew out of the Parent Engagement Institute, which recruits parents to volunteer in their children’s schools. Ladders takes it a step further, moving parents with at least 100 volunteer hours and an interest in an education career into its licensure track.

Most of them are Black and Latina mothers from the South and West sides.

In CPS, perennial staffing imbalances have left some campuses without SECAs, teacher assistants and other support staff. While vacancy rates are at all-time lows, the district is still grappling with how to best recruit and retain workers for those roles. Paraprofessional turnover tends to be high across Illinois, driven partly by low hourly pay and minimal training.

So why not turn to parents already on campus?

“You’ve got to have healthy schools for a healthy community. And for that, you’ve got to have engaged and involved parents,” said Flor Dimas, co-manager of Ladders. “They are stakeholders.”

Since 2023, more than 1,100 parents have become licensed paraprofessionals through Ladders, including 373 in CPS. The program now runs on a $25 million grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services and has expanded to 11 pilot sites across the state.

Participants are recruited by community-based organizers embedded in schools. Depending on the specific licensure track, they receive weeks of training in professional development, digital literacy and ESL, all aimed at passing a state exam. Along the way, they get personal coaching, childcare during program activities and reimbursement for licensure fees. Coaches later guide parents through the hiring process with mock interviews and resume-building.

Johnson completed the program even after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in February — and while caring for her 6-year-old son, who is “proud of his mama,” she added. Her coach, an organizer with Teamwork Englewood, pushed her through the paperwork and studying sessions.

“They were right there. They said, ‘Don’t give up, Maria. No, I’m not letting you give up,’” Johnson said.

What parents bring to campus, organizers say, is hard to overstate: Lived experience, relationships built over years of drop-offs and pickups, cultural fluency and hundreds of hours already logged in the classroom.

“Who is impacted by parents in the classroom? Students,” Dimas said, addressing two dozen organizers at the program’s kickoff event. “They look like them, they talk like them, they live in the community.”

Many end up as SECAs — often bilingual SECAs, one of the most sought-after hires in CPS. Their responsibilities include tutoring, notetaking, mobility support and toileting for students with disabilities. It’s exacting work, and the district hasn’t always kept up: In 2018, CPS underwent state corrective action for systematically failing to provide services to students with disabilities, including SECAs.

Since 2019, the share of students with disabilities has grown from 14.6% to 17.3%, or nearly 55,000 students. In that time, CPS has added a staggering 3,600 SECA positions to keep pace, according to the district’s employee rosters. The district’s 2% vacancy rate, with about 160 openings at the start of the month, is its lowest in recent memory.

Still, those numbers remain higher in CPS networks on the South and West sides, district data shows. Officials last year adjusted how they staffed special education classrooms, in part to attempt to shift more SECAs into underserved communities. But the move ultimately did little to redistribute staffing.

Barb Cohen, a special education advocate at Legal Council for Health Justice, said she believes vacancies would drop with better training — a gap Ladders is aiming to close. To be a SECA, applicants must pass the state exam, which mostly covers reading, writing and math, or hold a college degree or 60 college credit hours in any subject.

SEIU Local 73, the union representing SECAs in CPS, won for the first time one day of paid onboarding and training in its most recent contract.

“We have people who are hired because they have the required number of college credit hours in anything under the sun, but no particular training to work with children and no particular knowledge of disabilities,” Cohen said.

At Darwin Elementary in Logan Square, Principal Daniel De Los Reyes hired four Ladders participants last year, mostly as miscellaneous workers who fill in part-time as lunch and recess monitors. Knowing a parent graduated from the program “allows (him) to vet, train and develop the mindset, the disposition and the work ethic” of job applicants.

Darwin has a dual-language program, and more than a third of its student body is English learners. The school has welcomed scores of immigrant families in recent years, according to De Los Reyes, and Ladders creates a pipeline for mostly Latina mothers to become educators. They help run programming and set up decorations for Día de los Muertos and Hispanic Heritage Month.

“There’s a need in school, and there’s a resource in the community,” De Los Reyes said.

De Los Reyes was a paraprofessional for four years before becoming a teacher and later a principal. More than 160 Ladders parents have gone on to become accredited substitute teachers, and about a dozen so far now have professional educator licenses.

“I have Ladders graduates last year who I can see as primary bilingual teachers,” he said. “I often have the mindset that the solutions lie within the building, or within the community.”

In West Lawn, Anna Sanchez was hired in April as a substitute SECA at Hurley Elementary, where her 7-year-old daughter attends second grade. Before the program, she worked at an ice cream shop.

Her biggest worry going in was the language barrier. She grew up in Mexico and had lived in the U.S. for 17 years, but wasn’t sure she could handle an hourslong licensure exam. Through Ladders, she learned that and more, she said — how to navigate a professional workplace, how to support children with disabilities, how best to engage with students.

“I learned that we should not only focus on the students, but also support and guide parents on how they can also help their children outside of school,” Sanchez said in Spanish.

Next, she wants to become a teacher.

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