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2020: When the student becomes the teacher.
With COVID-19 sidelining large numbers of educators around the country, some districts are waiving certification requirements and offering bonuses to recruit college students on extended winter breaks to step up to the chalkboard and keep physical classrooms open.
Last month, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont made a plea to college students coming home for their winter break to help beef up staffing in hospitals, virus testing sites and schools. Lamont said the students would earn income and experience while helping provide supervision in classrooms where teachers are quarantined and giving lessons remotely.
“Look you could binge watch Netflix for three weeks but we have some other ways that you could really be of assistance, helping your entire community get through this pandemic,” Lamont said at a November news briefing.
Wellesley College freshman Isabel Orozco is working as a substitute teacher in the Cheshire, Connecticut district where she graduated high school in June, and is considering taking spring classes online so she can continue her in-person work.
“Anything I can do to help, I feel good about,” Orozco said.
In Indiana, the 4,400-student Greenfield-Central school district appealed to undergraduates to bolster its dried-up substitute pool.
“I said, ’If you’ve got a student who’s in college, maybe they’d like to work even a two-month thing for us – which would be a stopgap, no doubt – but it will help us a whole, whole bunch,” said Scott Kern, the Greenfield-Central Community School Corporation director of human resources.
More than a dozen college students responded to the call for action, among them Kern’s 19-year-old daughter Grace, who studies medical imaging technology at a nearby university.
“My dad told me that a bunch of teachers are out and they’re struggling to get substitutes in. And I was like, ‘Well, all my classes are online, except for one, so I have the time to do it.’ And I would hate for the schools and the students to struggle,” Kern said.
School districts often turn to retirees to fill in as substitutes, but many of them have been staying home over health concerns during the pandemic, amplifying staffing issues already reduced by a wave of early retirements and health leaves taken by staff who have been exposed to the virus or are at high risk.
Kelly Education president Nicola Soares says her company has been recruiting college students as substitutes for years, and the shortage of teachers has only been accelerated by the pandemic.
“So when I think about the pandemic and everything that we have seen for the past 10 months it has absolutely exacerbated the issue around teacher shortages and also substitute teacher shortages,” Soares said, adding that she doesn’t expect much relief next school year. “We have seen a lot of folks leave the profession. The openings are going to increase, so it is domino effect.”
New teacher Lisa Usry, of Charleston, South Carolina, encountered this firsthand after being called on to fill in for an instructor in his mid-60s who quit abruptly.
“He worked a couple weeks and said, ‘I’m out of here’ and walked out the door,” she recalled.
In Nebraska, more smaller districts are applying for exemptions to a requirement that substitutes have a teaching certificate. This exception would allow for subs who have 60 college credits, and passed a teaching course and received bias and discrimination training.
The higher standards in the Cornhusker State had been due to heavy reliance on using retired substitutes. However, this year, the Nebraska State Education Association found that only one third of 500 teachers surveyed planned to step foot in the classroom.
Pat Shepard, a 74-year-old retired Spanish teacher from Lincoln, has been subbing more than more ever, enticed by bonuses offered by the district for committing to a certain number of jobs each month. Many friends of hers in the same position decided to go the opposite route.
“One she has a father who is 89 with a heart condition and a brand new grandbaby so she is not willing. I’ve had some others who are cancer survivors and things like that. And they are just not willing to take that risk,” Shepard said. “I’m a little bit more concerned now after Thanksgiving because our our cases here are just getting more and more everyday in the city.”
In Iowa, some administrators and counselors are being called into action to serve as substitutes as more and more jobs go unfilled, despite lowered requirements.
“That is one of the reasons why some of the districts went and are still in virtual or remote because they just didn’t have the staffing,” Coy Marquardt, associate executive director at the Iowa State Education Association said.
With Post wires
