COVID-19 caused substitute teachers to leave the classroom. How will Fort Worth adapt?
As Fort Worth’s first day of school approached last summer, Edy Lou Mayfield was ready to go back to work.
Mayfield, a substitute teacher in the Fort Worth school district, had stopped working at the beginning of the pandemic, when the district closed its buildings and shifted to online learning. But now that she was vaccinated and case counts in Tarrant County hadn’t spiked over the summer, going back to work seemed like a safe option.
“I was very optimistic,” she said. “I had gotten myself ready to go.”
But that optimism didn’t last long. Within days, Mayfield was back at home in quarantine after being exposed to COVID-19 at school. At 71, she knows she’s at increased risk due to her age. Although she’s eager to get back in the classroom, Mayfield is waiting for the county’s COVID-19 numbers to improve before she goes back to work.
The Fort Worth school district is experiencing a dire shortage of substitute teachers. A district administrator told the district’s Board of Trustees last month that school leaders were unable to find substitutes to cover even half of the district’s teacher absences. When principals can’t find substitutes to cover for absent teachers, they’re forced to improvise, asking teachers to cover two classes at once or having other staff members like librarians and reading coaches fill in.
The shortage of substitute teachers isn’t unique to Fort Worth. Nationwide, school leaders have had to scramble to find staff to cover for absent teachers. A national expert in substitute teaching says districts may need to find ways to cover teacher absences that fit with new realities in the labor market.
“We have to rethink how we cover when a teacher needs to be out of the classroom,” said Amanda von Moos, founder of the education advocacy group Substantial Classrooms.
COVID exposure pulled substitute from classroom
Mayfield spent 35 years teaching English and social studies in the Plainview school district, about 45 miles north of Lubbock.
When she retired, she and her husband moved to Fort Worth. In 2017, she began working as a substitute teacher in the Fort Worth school district. She likes to work, she said, and it seemed like a way to continue to support public education.
When the Fort Worth school district began bringing students back to school in person in October 2020, Mayfield didn’t feel comfortable with the prospect of going back to work. There were still no vaccines available at that point, and case counts in the county were high. But as soon as vaccines became available, she and her husband got both doses. For most of the summer, case counts in the county remained low. So as the first day of school approached, Mayfield re-enrolled herself in the district’s substitute teacher system and made sure her credentials were still active.
When the school year began in August, Mayfield was glad to be back at work, she said. But on her fourth day back at school, the district notified her that she’d been exposed to someone with a positive case of COVID-19 at school. She had to go home and quarantine. Because she was fully vaccinated, Mayfield’s quarantine period was shorter. But she knew her and her husband’s age put them both at higher risk if they caught a breakthrough case, and she didn’t feel safe going back into the classroom without a universal masking policy in place. So she decided to wait until the district began requiring masks.
On Sept. 13, the district began enforcing a mask mandate in defiance of an executive order from Gov. Greg Abbott barring districts from requiring masks. So Mayfield went back to work. But before the day was out, a Tarrant County district court judge issued a ruling blocking the district from enforcing its requirement. After that, Mayfield said she didn’t feel safe going back into the classroom.
Shortage of substitutes is more acute this year
Karen Molinar, the district’s deputy superintendent, told the district’s Board of Trustees during a Sept. 14 meeting that the district’s fill rate for teacher absences — the percentage of teacher absences the district was able to find a substitute to cover — was 78%. This year, that number had dropped to 43%, she said. The district has seen far more teacher absences than it had at the same point last year, Molinar said.
District officials didn’t respond to inquiries for this story, including a request for an updated fill rate.
Michael Steinert, the district’s assistant superintendent for student support services, told the board that the district had seen a drastic uptick in COVID-19 exposures at school, both among students and staff. Each time a student or employee is exposed to someone who tests positive for the virus, the district notifies the employee or the student’s parents. In the first five weeks of the current school year, the district nearly surpassed the number of notifications it made for all of the 2019-20 school year, he said.
The district has never had to shut down an entire school or an entire grade level, Steinert said. But in a few cases, school leaders had to send entire classes home to quarantine because of the way a COVID-positive student moved around the classroom or a teacher cycled through small-group sessions with students, he said.
Steinert said two key factors drove the uptick in teacher absences at the beginning of the year. Nearly all students and teachers are back at school in person this year, making spacing more difficult and increasing the likelihood that someone in any given classroom has the virus. Also, the broader community saw high COVID-19 case counts in the first weeks of the year.
The district has a plan to move staff members who are certified teachers from other campuses or the district’s central office into schools that are hard-hit by teacher vacancies or absences.
Trustee Roxanne Martinez told administrators parents had complained to her that their children spent school days sitting in auditoriums because there were no substitutes available to cover their classes. Martinez said she was pleased to hear about the district’s plan to redeploy staff members to cover those absences.
Substitute shortage is a nationwide problem
The shortage of substitutes isn’t unique to Fort Worth schools.
In a survey conducted by the publication Education Week between Sept. 29 and Oct. 8, 77% of principals and district leaders said they’d struggled to hire an adequate number of substitutes. More district leaders reported struggling to find enough substitutes than any other staffing position. About two-thirds of the principals and district leaders surveyed said they’ve asked existing employees to take on extra responsibilities to make up for staffing shortages.
The problem has forced districts and states to scramble to find ways to cover for absent teachers. In Oregon, the state Teacher Standards and Practices Commission temporarily dropped a bachelor’s degree requirement for applicants seeking to become substitute teachers. School leaders in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Franklin County, Virginia, have shut down campuses and temporarily shifted to virtual learning due to a lack of substitute teachers. And districts nationwide have increased substitute teacher pay in hopes of attracting more candidates.
Von Moos, the Substantial Classrooms co-founder, said districts typically have more trouble finding substitutes to cover teacher absences as the school year winds on. More teachers need time away from the classroom to handle other parts of their jobs like parent-teacher conferences, she said. And when cold and flu season arrives, more teachers have to call in sick and more substitutes are unable to work because they’re ill, she said.
Districts also typically see their substitute teacher pools shrink through the fall, von Moos said. Some substitutes have a bad experience in their first few weeks on the job and decide to stop taking substitute jobs. Others only needed the work to fill a gap until they find permanent work, and they stop taking substitute jobs when a full-time job comes along, she said.
Although the pandemic exacerbated the situation, it didn’t create the shortage of substitutes, von Moos said. Before the pandemic began, the substitute fill rate at most school districts hovered between about 75-85%, she said. Although that percentage was substantially better than where it stands now, it still meant that districts were unable to find substitutes to cover large numbers of teacher absences, she said.
Changes in the labor market were among the factors driving that shortage, she said. Substitute teaching was the original gig economy job, she said. Substitute teachers got to decide when, where and how often they worked, but they were given little support, training or opportunities to advance. That arrangement wasn’t good for substitute teachers or students, she said, but it kept districts’ costs low.
Now, workers looking for the flexibility that substitute teaching offers have many more options to choose from, von Moos said. Some of the employers hiring gig workers have improved the packages they offer, which could make them more competitive options over substitute teaching, she said. Gig workers typically want a quick onboarding process and immediate pay, which school districts typically can’t offer, she said.
If school districts want to compete for those workers, they need to lean into their strengths, von Moos said. Substitute teaching offers temporary workers a way to help their communities and do meaningful work — something not every gig employer can say, she said. Some temporary workers find that purpose and connection appealing, she said. Increased pay could also help attract more candidates to substitute teaching jobs, she said.
Districts would also do well to rethink the role of the candidates they hire as substitute teachers, von Moos said. One option could be to turn substitute teaching jobs into a kind of apprenticeship for prospective teachers, she said.
Fort Worth subs say COVID fears drive shortage
Jan Weisner, a substitute teacher in the Fort Worth school district, said the job is noticeably different this year. Weisner began substitute teaching in 2019 after she retired from teaching at the International Newcomer Academy. The job is less predictable this year, she said. Sometimes she might sign up to substitute for a class and then show up at school, where an administrator tells her they need her to teach something else. Other times, she’s ended up covering more than one class at once because the school couldn’t find enough substitutes.
Weisner said she thinks many of the district’s substitutes have chosen not to work this year because they’re worried about catching COVID-19 at school. She’s less concerned about that possibility now that she’s been vaccinated, she said. She still wears a mask and tries to keep her distance from students. But she’s noticed that many students refuse to wear masks.
“I don’t know how teachers feel about it, but it makes me nervous,” Weisner said.
Penelope Coffee, another Fort Worth substitute teacher, said she’s also heard from other substitutes that they aren’t working this year because they’re worried about catching the virus at school. A broken hip kept Coffee out of the classroom during the worst days of the pandemic, but she’s back at work this year.
Coffee has worked as a substitute for nine years, since she retired from teaching at the International Newcomer Academy. This year, she’s noticed that principals are more likely to ask her to work through the entire school day without a break. Classroom teachers have planning periods built into their schedules, and that period would typically be down time for substitutes. But this year, principals often ask her to cover another class during that period. She doesn’t mind the extra work, but she says it’s an obvious sign that the district doesn’t have enough substitutes.
Mayfield, the retired Plainview teacher, said many substitutes, like her, are retired teachers who started working as substitutes as a way to stay busy and earn extra income in retirement, she said. But their age puts those teachers at greater risk if they catch a breakthrough case, she said. Many of them have also found other ways of staying busy and earning extra income, such as a new tutoring program the Texas Retired Teachers Association announced last week.
During her annual physical, Mayfield asked her doctor what to do. The doctor told her that, if she needed the money, she should put on a mask and go back to work. If not, the doctor told her to wait until she’s had a booster shot and the county’s positivity rate drops below 10%.
Mayfield is scheduled to get a booster shot this week. On Oct. 26, the county’s seven-day rolling average positivity rate stood at 12.67%, a slight uptick after weeks of decline.
Over the past several weeks, Mayfield has been watching the county’s case counts closely. If they continue to decline, as county health officials predict, she hopes she’ll be back in the classroom in early December. She likes the work, she said. She looks forward to getting back to it as soon as she can. But for now, she’s still waiting.
