Am I a personal health care worker or am I a para educator?

Our district has handed our Union a new job description for Sp. Ed. Assistants and it contains feeding tubes and cathers, plus modifing students assignments, and tests, logging injurys and meds. Many of our assistants object to these duties as we have Health Care Assistants in each of our buildings who we think should be doing the medical end of these duties and the teachers should take care of all modifications. We are to carry out and support our students but we are not licensed teachers or nurses. We plan to object to many of the items on this new job descsription but feel that we do not have much of a chance of fighting this with our administrators. Any one out there have some advice for us.

Special Ed. Assistant
Wiscsonsin
Anne

Dear Reltots, The aides in Bflo had to deal with that problem back in the late 80's. When I first began as an aide I worked in a school that serviced handicapped students toileting. feeding,etc. was done by County health workers and Nurses. All of a sudden it changed one year there were about 40 TA's added to the staff and those were the jobs they were given. Transporting, lifting, feeding you name it. Aides even had to get in the swimming pool with these students. A male student could be given to a Personal Care female aide. We still have Personal Care aides for students but we also have Health Aides. These are Teacher Aides who paid to take a course dealing with administering medication, feeding, toileting, etc. to service students whose IEP calls for a health aide. They also have a higher pay scale. There are over 60 health Aides on the list but only 5 are actually working. The BOE no longer classify students as needing health aides they just assign Personal Care Aides to these students with no extra pay. PCA'a are still considered Teacher Aides no matter what they are assigned to do therefore they are paid at Teacher Aide scale.