The Paraprofessional's Day

A 90-minute, 4-round basic Express simulation on the first quarter of a paraprofessional in a middle-school inclusion classroom: putting a student's IEP accommodations in place exactly as written instead of doing the work for him, working inside the teacher's plan, answering a meltdown with the calm steps of the student's behavior plan, keeping everyone safe without a physical restraint that Illinois law allows only for an imminent danger of serious physical harm and only by trained staff (105 ILCS 5/10-20.33(c)), keeping a student's education records private from other parents (FERPA, 34 CFR §99.30; IDEA, 34 CFR §300.622), routing a family's questions to the teacher, bringing honest progress data to the IEP review and planning with the teacher to fade adult prompts, for high-school Career and Technical Education in education and training (Educators Rising) and courses preparing the ETS ParaPro Assessment.

Zuleima Tavira, 19, a fictional paraprofessional at Prairie Hollow Middle School in Aurora, Illinois, supports Kellan Brisbois, 12, and three other students with an IEP in Ms. Renata Halloway's seventh-grade English class, with case manager Desmond Lockridge, from August to October 2027.

Round by round you decide how to apply the accommodations and work with the teacher, how to respond to a meltdown and a student heading for the door, how to answer another parent's question and a mother's email, and what data to bring to the IEP review and how to support the student next quarter; at each decision point the whole quarter is projected again with the decisions taken so far.

Each round is scored on work done independently, class minutes lost, the over-help rate, the goal-data score and team trust, with open violations shown alongside; a restraint outside the law or a student's IEP disclosed to another parent caps the score. English with Spanish.

An introductory simulation that assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, designed for undergraduate courses. It also works in vocational and high-school programmes and in onboarding sessions.