This article on the substitute teacher crisis was produced by The Hechinger Report, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Subscribe to Hechinger’s newsletter.
Stefanie Fernandez usually spends her work week in the financial office of Independent Stave, a company that manufactures oak barrels for bourbon and other beverages, headquartered in Lebanon, Missouri.
But once every week or two since December, Fernandez dragged her son to his middle school when she went to drop him off for classes. She pops into the office, picks up a tape with ‘subnotes’ and reports to a classroom.
“Good morning, class,” she greets the masked students. “I’m Mrs. Fernandez, and that’s what we’re going to do today.”
Fernandez is one of several Independent Stave administrative staff members who have hired their employer to spend up to one day a week substitute education in the Lebanon school district. The business makes the difference between the school department’s substitute teachers and their regular salaries.
The aim is to address a substitute teacher crisis that is making districts across the country struggling to find substitutes when teachers are absent due to Covid-19 or for other reasons.
“I do not think we have fixed the problem, but we are part of the solution,” said Jeremiah Hough, a vice president of the barrel manufacturer.
Hough is also vice president of the Lebanon School Board, so he is well aware of the challenges facing the district. Hough proposed offering substitute training opportunities to his company’s administrative staff in December, after school administrators warned that the district was sending nearly 4,300 students home to learn on virtual platforms because too many teachers were ill or in quarantine. is.
The support of the local business has given a moral boost and good publicity, said David Schmitz, the district superintendent. “It was remarkable to help us get the message out that we need help,” he said.
Almost no one thinks that a high dependence on substitutes – who usually have no teacher certification and minimal class experience – is ideal for students. But by getting replacements from his community into classrooms during this unusual year, the Lebanon district has managed to find tentative, local solutions to a problem that is confusing teachers in his state and across the country.
Many school districts report a daily struggle to introduce adults to students. They took administrators out of offices and into classrooms, canceled professional development sessions, and asked teachers to abandon planning periods and juggle different classes. If all else failed, they sent students home for virtual learning.
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The pandemic has exposed chronic staff shortages in schools across the country. Even before the coronavirus hit, schools could fill only about 54 percent of 250,000 vacancies for teachers each day, according to a survey of more than 2,000 educators released by the EdWeek Research Center early last year. Now the shortages are much worse, say district leaders and principals, because the need has increased significantly, although the work has become more risky. Many retired teachers, a group district that regularly seeks help, chose not to undergo exposure to the virus, while parents seeking substitutes for part-time income stayed home to supervise children learning online.
The desperate search for substitute teachers has led some states and school districts to have lower qualifications for people entrusted with educating and supervising America’s schoolchildren at a time when learning losses are already increasing.
“When there are problems filling classrooms, the reaction is often that we lower the beam, let us widen the gate,” said Richard Ingersoll, a professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s disastrous to do that. You’re actually giving up qualifications because you think it’s an emergency.”
The shortages, and how states respond to them, could have long-term consequences: studies have documented that only ten days of teacher absence could lead to lower math and English arts test scores for primary school pupils. And not all substitute teachers are equally qualified; those with training and certificates are more effective than those with a minimal qualification. Research also shows that schools with a high poverty rate and a large number of black and Latino students have the greatest difficulty in finding qualified substitutes to cover classes.
If substitutes are not available, principals regularly call on other teachers on campus to supervise absent teachers. But even that can be detrimental to learning, says Ingersoll, who studies what he calls ‘off-field’ teaching – teachers assigned to subjects that do not match their education or training.
“There are all these stopholes that the public does not know about, which are often detrimental to learning,” he said.
Brent Snyder, principal of Lebanon Middle School, remembers the early months of this school year as a raging time.
“We will be missing some staff positions every day,” he said. “My secretary spent the whole day calling different teachers during their planning periods to ask them to cover a classroom. We would have classrooms that would literally have a different teacher every day.”
Students lost the teaching time because teachers used the first 15 minutes of each period to find out what was going on in class. Children fell behind and teachers were discouraged.
“I would walk around the school and could see the tension on their faces,” Snyder said. “I would ask how they are, and they would just say to me, ‘I’m exhausted. ‘
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Around the same time that the local barrel manufacturer was using to help, the district also offered a financial incentive to cast a wider net.
The Lebanon school district pays its deputies $ 85 a day – about average for districts in Missouri. It is slightly higher than the minimum wage of $ 10.30 per hour, but it was not much of an attraction for a job that was already difficult, and even more so during a pandemic. In December, the School Board approved a $ 200 temporary bonus when a substitute completed a fifth day of work.
“We wanted to give a bonus, but we also wanted people to commit to us for several days,” said Schmitz, the district superintendent.
In a rural school district where leaders watch every dollar, the bonuses were a big prize, ‘Schmitz said. But it was worth it to be able to recruit substitutes.
Although the School District of Lebanon has had some success with creative measures, it is more difficult to find broader solutions to the substitute teacher crisis.
The most important strategy that states have used is to make it easier to become a sub. At the beginning of this school year, the Missouri State Board of Education suspended its requirement that applicants must have 60 university credits to be certified as substitute teachers. For a period of six months that must end on Sunday, anyone with a high school diploma or the equivalent can replace it if he or she completes a 20-hour online training session and passes the required background test.
In the suburbs of Atlanta, the district of Gwinnett County Public Schools has also relaxed the requirements for substitute teachers, as has the entire state of Arizona. But not enough people have benefited, despite the economic downturn and rising unemployment. Gwinnett replaces only 67 percent of vacancies for teachers; last year, it covered nine out of ten absences, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And school districts in Arizona still report a daily rush to staff classrooms.
Connecticut is another state that makes it easier to become a sub to make up for pandemic teacher shortages: the state has waived its requirement for a bachelor’s degree. Despite the waiver, Jeffrey Solan struggled to man classes for the 4,200 students enrolled at the Cheshire Public Schools, where he is superintendent.
“Unfortunately, it did not work,” Solan said. From 2017, he appealed to graduates to apply for substitutes in the district, and quickly created a pool of energetic young people who wanted to serve their community with jobs they could plan for online classes.
“It was a kind of family reunion,” Solan said.
As with the Lebanon school district, Cheshire has managed to find a creative solution in a difficult year. But questions about who should run the principal of America if their teachers are absent will survive the pandemic.
Emma García, who specializes in education policy from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit research group, said her research points to the need for more training and training for substitutes, and not less.
“I understand that you may need to adjust your criteria to the emergency,” she said. “But the only way your kids can really help catch up is to focus on the quality of the instructors. Do you want to be vaccinated by an incompetent, unprepared nurse? I don’t think so.”
Jing Liu, an assistant professor of education policy at the University of Maryland, studies the availability and equality issues regarding substitute teachers. Liu argued that schools serving poor districts need help if they are to attract the number of qualified substitutes they need to reopen.
“For sub-teachers, you have to think about jobs like Uber drivers and the gig economy,” he said. “You have to compete with all the alternative opportunities.”
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Schmitz, the Lebanon superintendent, said the pandemic put a spotlight on long-standing staffing issues. Like many of his peers in Missouri, he thinks the state should permanently waive its credit requirement for unions.
“We have always had challenges in getting replacements,” he said. “I believe there are talented and talented people out there who may not be in college for more than 60 hours.”
Meanwhile, Stefanie Fernandez, the financial administrator who released her job at the barrel manufacturer to help the School District in Lebanon meet its need for replacements, said she enjoys the experience – for now.
“I do it one day a week,” she said. “I’m not sure if I want to do it five days a week for the rest of my life.”