This article on the substitute teacher crisis was produced by The Hechinger Report, an independent, non-profit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Subscribe to Hechinger’s newsletter.
Stefanie Fernandez usually spends her workweek at the financial office of Independent Stave, a company that makes oak barrels for bourbon and other alcoholic beverages, based in Lebanon, Missouri.
But once every week or two since December, Fernandez accompanies his son to school when she takes him to class. She enters the office, takes a binder with “secondary notes” and informs the classroom.
“Good morning, class”, she greets the masked students. “I am Mrs. Fernandez and that is what we are going to do today.”
Fernandez is one of several independent Stave administrative employees who accepted his employer’s offer to spend up to one day a week as a substitute teacher in Lebanon’s school district. The company compensates for the difference between the salary of the substitute teacher in the school district and his regular salaries.
The goal is to resolve a substitute teacher crisis that has left districts across the country struggling to find substitutes when teachers are absent because of Covid-19 or for other reasons.
“I don’t think we fixed the problem, but we are part of the solution,” said Jeremiah Hough, vice president at the barrel maker.
Hough is also vice president of the Lebanese School Council, so he is well aware of the challenges facing the district. Hough proposed offering substitute teaching opportunities for his company’s administrative staff in December, after school administrators warned that the district was close to sending all of its 4,300 students home to learn on virtual platforms because many teachers were sick or quarantined.
Support from local commerce provided a moral boost and good publicity, said David Schmitz, the district superintendent. “It has been remarkable to help us get the message across that we need help,” he said.
Almost no one thinks that a strong reliance on substitutes – who generally lack teacher certification and minimal classroom experience – is ideal for students. But by placing substitutes from his community in classrooms this unusual year, the Lebanon district has so far managed to find temporary local solutions to a problem that is confusing educators in his state and across the country.
Many school districts report a daily struggle to put adults in front of students. They took the administrators out of the offices and placed them in the classrooms, canceled professional development sessions and asked teachers to give up planning periods and juggle multiple classes. When all else failed, they sent the students home for virtual learning.
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The pandemic exposed the chronic shortage of staff in schools across the country. Even before the coronavirus hit, schools were able to fill only about 54% of the 250,000 teacher vacancies per day, according to a survey of more than 2,000 educators released earlier last year by the EdWeek Research Center. Now the shortage is much worse, say district leaders and directors, because the need has increased significantly, even when work has become more risky. Many retired teachers, a group that districts often turn to for help, have chosen not to be exposed to the virus and do not risk exposing themselves to the virus, while parents seeking substitute jobs for a part-time income have stayed home to supervise children’s learning online.
The desperate search for substitute teachers has led some states and school districts to reduce the qualifications of those charged with educating and supervising students in America at a time when learning losses are already mounting.
“When there is difficulty filling the classrooms, the reaction is usually: let’s lower the level, let’s expand the gate,” said Richard Ingersoll, professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. “It is disastrous to do that. Basically, you are sacrificing qualifications because you think it is an emergency.”
Scarcity, and the way states respond to it, can have long-term consequences: studies have documented that just 10 days of teacher absence can result in lower grades in English math and arts for elementary school students. And not all substitute teachers are equally qualified; those with training and certifications are more effective than those with minimal credentials. The survey also shows that schools with high poverty rates and large numbers of black and Latino students have the greatest difficulty in finding qualified substitutes to cover classes.
When substitutes are not available, principals usually call other teachers on campus to cover absent teachers. But even that can hinder learning, said Ingersoll, who studies what he calls “off the field” teaching – teachers who are assigned to subjects that do not correspond to their education or training.
“There are all these obstacles that happen, that the public does not know, that are often harmful to learning,” he said.
Brent Snyder, head of Lebanon Middle School, remembers the first months of this school year as a hectic time.
“We would have few positions on the team every day,” he said. “My secretary spent the whole day calling different teachers about periods in the plan to ask them to cover a classroom. We would have classrooms that would literally have a different teacher each time of the day.”
Students wasted instruction time, as teachers used the first 15 minutes or more of each period to find out what was going on in class. The children were falling behind and the teachers were desperate.
“I was walking around the school and I could see the stress on their faces,” said Snyder. “I asked how they were and they just said, ‘I’m exhausted’.”
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At about the same time that the local keg maker stepped in to help, the district also offered a financial incentive to launch a broader network.
Lebanon’s school district pays its substitutes $ 85 a day – an average of districts in Missouri. This is just above the $ 10.30 hourly minimum wage, but it was not very attractive for a job that is already difficult, and even more so during a pandemic. In December, the School Board approved a $ 200 temporary bonus when a replacement completes a fifth day of work.
“We wanted to offer 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 high price,” said Schmitz. But it was worth it to be able to recruit replacements.
Although Lebanon’s school district has had some success with creative measures, broader solutions to the substitute teacher crisis have been more difficult to find.
The main strategy used by states is simply to make it easier to become a sub. Earlier this school year, the Missouri State Board of Education lifted its requirement that applicants have 60 college credits to be certified as substitute teachers. For a six-month period scheduled to end on Sunday, anyone with a high school diploma or equivalent can replace you if he or she completes a 20-hour online training session and passes the necessary background check.
In the suburbs of Atlanta, the Gwinnett County Public Schools district has also eased its requirements for substitute teachers, as has the entire state of Arizona. But there are not enough people taking advantage, despite the economic crisis and rising unemployment. Gwinnett is finding substitutes for just 67% of teacher vacancies; last year, it covered nine of the ten absences, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And school districts in Arizona still report a daily run to employees’ classrooms.
Connecticut is another state that has made it easier to become a replacement to make up for the teacher shortage pandemic: the state has waived the bachelor’s degree requirement. Despite the resignation, Jeffrey Solan was struggling to provide classes for the 4,200 students enrolled in the Cheshire Public Schools, where he is superintendent.
“Unfortunately, it wasn’t working,” said Solan. He appealed to 2017 graduates to apply for a replacement in the district and quickly created a group of energetic young people, happy to serve their community with jobs they could schedule around online classes.
“It was a kind of family reunion,” said Solan.
As in the Lebanese school district, Cheshire managed to find a creative solution in a difficult year. But questions about who should be in charge of schoolchildren when their teachers are absent will survive the pandemic.
Emma García, who specializes in educational policy for the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit research group, said her research indicates the need for more education and training for substitutes, not less.
“I understand that you need to adapt your criteria to the emergency,” she said. “But the only way to really help children recover is to focus on the quality of the instructors. Would you like to be vaccinated by an unaccredited and unprepared nurse? I don’t think so.”
Jing Liu, assistant professor of educational policy at the University of Maryland, studies availability and equity issues related to 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 assistant teachers, you should think about jobs like Uber drivers and the gig economy,” he said. “You have to compete with every alternative opportunity.”
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Schmitz, Lebanon’s superintendent, said the pandemic has drawn attention to long-standing personnel issues. Like many of his colleagues in Missouri, he thinks the state should permanently waive the university credit requirement for subs.
“We have always had challenges to find substitutes,” he said. “I believe that there are talented and gifted people out there who may not have more than 60 hours in college.”
Meanwhile, Stefanie Fernandez, a finance administrator who is moving away from her job at the barrel factory to help Lebanon’s School District meet the need for replacements, said she is enjoying the experience – for now.
“I do this one day a week,” she said. “I’m not sure I would like to do this five days a week for the rest of my life.”