School districts are trying to bring students back for more in-person instruction, particularly in the younger grades. But superintendents say staffing shortages aggravated by the pandemic are getting in the way — and could even take them backward.
Worried about catching the virus at school, many educators took leaves or left the profession at the beginning of the year. By and large, schools nonetheless successfully reopened in September, but without much room to maneuver.
Now, as quarantines and cold and flu symptoms are increasingly keeping teachers at home for days or weeks at time, administrators say they’re struggling to maintain operations, even as they’re attempting to bring kids back for more face-to-face instruction.
“We lost 25 support staff members at the start of the year. And we lost about half of the people who are in our sub pool. So the hiring frenzy is on right now,” said Lynn Cota, the superintendent in the Franklin Northeast Supervisory Union.
This complication is not entirely surprising. Administrators widely expected a lack of substitute teachers, in particular, to be a big problem this year. Substitutes are tough to find even in non-pandemic times, but they are also often retired teachers, who, by virtue of their age, are in a high-risk category for Covid-19.
And substitutes are in extraordinarily high demand. That’s because quarantines aren’t the only things keeping educators at home — so are run-of-the mill cold symptoms that overlap with the coronavirus.
“As we’re entering into the flu season, the cold season, with the exhaustive list of symptoms related to Covid that people should be staying home for, we’re seeing the need for subs rise,” said Winooski Superintendent Sean McMannon.
In some districts, school board members are answering the call. The Agency of Education has already granted 20 waivers to board members asking to work as substitutes this year. (Without special permission from the secretary of Education, school board members cannot be employed within the districts they oversee.)
But schools say they need far more. In the Champlain Valley region alone, where superintendents raised the alarm about the problem in a statement released Friday afternoon, at least 100 positions are still unfilled.
Same problem all over the state
Such shortages are a statewide problem, according to Mill River Unified Union Superintendent David Younce, who said he’d nearly canceled bus routes Monday when two school bus health screeners unexpectedly had to stay home.
“Although we have done very well in Vermont to this point, day-to-day school operations are operating on very thin margins, with every day unpredictable,” said Younce, who is president of the Vermont Superintendents Association.
In the Orange Southwest School District, Superintendent Layne Millington on Sunday announced to families that three schools — Randolph Union High School, Braintree Elementary, and the Randolph Technical Center — would all need to temporarily go remote after a single positive case of Covid-19.
“We have a number of critical staff that will need to quarantine,” Millington wrote. “Because of this, we will not have the staff we need to keep some schools in the district up and running for the next few days.”
In Winooski, students in grades 1-4 are back in school four days a week after starting the year with only two days of in-person instruction. McMannon said his district would like to bring kindergartners and fifth graders back four days as well, but they’re not sure yet if they have adequate staff.
“We’re basically appealing to our communities. That this needs to be an effort by all of us, if we’re going to continue to move forward with our plans to at the very least get all elementary students back in four days a week — we’re going to need more people,” he said.
Substitutes are not the only staff in short supply. School leaders say they also need instructional aides, and they note that the professional staff they struggled to hire before the pandemic remain difficult to recruit and hire.
“We’re still down a school nurse. And we have actually come within inches of hire for that position seven times. And each time the person takes a position at the hospital instead, because it pays a lot more,” said Milton Superintendent Amy Rex.
