Some Fort Worth teachers worry about quality as they are stretched thin by quarantines
On a typical day in a typical school year, the teachers’ parking lot at Riverside Middle School in Fort Worth would be full. Five or six teachers who got to school too late to find a space would be parked along Bolton Street in front of the school. Another one or two might be parked next to the softball field northeast of the building.
But this year, so many teachers are out that anyone who pulled into the parking lot at any time of day would find about 20 open spaces to choose from.
Riverside is one of several schools in the Fort Worth school district that have been hit hard by COVID-19. According to the district’s COVID-19 dashboard, only six employees at Riverside had either tested positive or been asked to quarantine in the two weeks before Nov. 23. But teachers at the school say the picture is more grim than the dashboard shows: one week in November, teachers got an email from school leaders saying more than two dozen faculty and staff members were out on quarantine after either testing positive for the virus or coming in contact with someone who was infected. That included the school’s entire front office staff, including the principal, assistant principals and school secretaries. A math coach and a teacher’s assistant staffed the front office, several teachers said.
Across the Fort Worth school district, teachers, administrators and support staff have had to improvise to cover classes for teachers who are either on sick leave or teaching from home after being exposed to the virus. Teachers asked to quarantine, including many who test positive for the virus but don’t become seriously ill, are able to teach online from home. But even in those cases, another teacher or support staff member must watch quarantined teachers’ in-person students until they return.
As reported cases climb in Tarrant County and substitute teachers are in short supply, teachers in some schools say they worry their schools are rapidly reaching the point where there aren’t enough healthy adults to keep the doors open and offer students a reasonable standard of education.
“I think the question to consider there is what is the level of proficiency that’s being sought after?” said Celia Lehman, an English teacher at Riverside Middle School. “Because if you’re talking about open and successful and kids getting the proper education that they deserve and need, I think that number is higher than what our definition of keeping schools open is right now.”
Teachers doubling up classes
In late October, Lehman tested positive for COVID-19. After her test results came in, her principal asked her to work from home for 10 days. During that time, her in-person students went to another teacher’s class while Lehman taught them online.
Lehman said she was one of the first at Riverside to test positive. Now, just a few weeks after she returned to school, Lehman said that situation is far more common. More teachers have either contracted the disease or been asked to quarantine, she said. Even if those teachers are well enough to teach from home, an adult still needs to sit with their in-person students, she said. Because there aren’t enough substitutes to go around, that means school administrators either ask other staff members like librarians and teacher’s assistants to watch those classes or ask another teacher to double up. That creates additional stress for school staff and leaves students without a consistent routine, she said.
“I just feel like the kids are being dragged around a lot,” Lehman said.
Steven Poole, executive director of the United Educators Association, said the staffing situation at Riverside reflects a broader trend across the district. School leaders are asking teachers to take on more students or cover entire classes when their colleagues are out, he said. That puts strain on teachers who are able to show up to work, he said.
The district’s shortage of substitutes has been a problem for years, Poole said. But during a normal year, unfilled teacher absences are easy enough to accommodate. Schools split classes into smaller groups and send each group to a different teacher, so no single teacher has to handle two entire classes at once. But during a year when teachers already struggle to engage students online and in person at the same time and social distancing remains crucial, adding more students to teachers’ classrooms creates one more source of stress, he said.
Poole said he’s seen indications that a larger-than-usual number of teachers plan to retire at Christmas break. That would leave the district with even greater staffing shortages, he said, because it’s unlikely they’ll be able to fill all of those jobs in the middle of the year.
“There aren’t a whole lot of teachers just hanging out there waiting to be hired,” Poole said.
Poole said district officials need to be ready to shut down grade levels or entire schools and return students to online learning as more teachers are forced to stay home. Officials also need to make every staff member at the district’s central office, including Superintendent Kent Scribner, available to fill in for teachers where necessary, Poole said.
Several North Texas school districts have been forced to confront staffing issues because of the pandemic. On Nov. 17, officials in the Crowley school district announced the district would shut down its schools and return all students to virtual learning. The move came because of staffing shortages related to teachers, students and support staff either testing positive for the virus or being asked to quarantine after being exposed, officials said. The shutdown began Nov. 19 and continued through the district’s Thanksgiving break.
Other districts, including Hurst-Euless-Bedford, Keller and Sanger, have shut down individual schools due to coronavirus outbreaks.
Central office staff could fill in
Cherie Washington, a chief of student and school support for the Fort Worth school district, said district officials this month outlined a list of central office staff members who could go to any campus to fill in if shortages become severe enough.
The district has other options it can try before it sends central office staff to cover classes, Washington said. Executive directors — administrators who oversee groups of schools called pyramids — can move staff members such as instructional coaches, stay-in-school coordinators and data analysts from one campus to another to cover unfilled absences, she said. If several schools had staffing shortages that executive directors couldn’t cover, the district would send in central office staff to help, she said. If the situation worsened to the point that schools couldn’t cover all their unfilled absences even with help from central office staff, the district would consider shutting down affected schools, she said.
Washington acknowledged that asking teachers who are still on campus to take on extra students creates more work for them. But she said having some students at home and some at school in person allows schools to keep everyone spaced out, even in cases where classes are doubled up in a single classroom. Schools won’t put more than 20 students in a classroom, she said. If a school had no choice but to group more than 20 students together, they’d be in a larger space like an auditorium or a library, she said.
If positive cases continue to climb, it could have a dramatic effect on school staff and students, Washington said. When teachers are asked to quarantine after being exposed to someone with the virus, they can generally teach from home, she said. School leaders have to find someone else to stay with their in-person students, she said, but those classes don’t lose out on instruction. But if more teachers catch the virus and become too sick to teach from home, the district will have to find someone else to teach those classes. Generally, that job falls to non-certified substitute teachers or another staff member who’s less qualified than the permanent classroom teachers they’re replacing, she said.
District leaders understand that teachers are in a difficult position this year, Washington said. She praised teachers and other staff in the district for their flexibility and willingness to take on extra responsibilities.
“They are being champs right now,” she said. “Everyone is pitching in. It’s all hands on deck.”
Substitute shortage
The lack of substitute teachers isn’t a new problem, nor is it limited to Fort Worth. For years, school districts have struggled to recruit enough substitutes to cover every teacher absence. That shortage is most pronounced in districts with high percentages of Black, Hispanic and low-income students, said Jing Liu, a professor of education policy at the University of Maryland, College Park.
In a paper published in September in the journal Education Finance and Policy, Liu and researchers from Brown University and Syracuse University looked at administrative data and surveyed permanent teachers and substitute teachers at a large urban school district on the West Coast. The researchers found that, while teachers in disadvantaged schools weren’t absent substantially more often than their peers, their absences were more likely to go unfilled.
One of the main factors driving schools’ ability to fill substitute teacher jobs is substitutes’ willingness to serve in those schools, Liu said. In surveys, researchers asked substitute teachers to name three schools where they preferred to work and three where they didn’t. Teachers consistently named as their least-preferred schools a subset of campuses with significantly lower average student achievement, higher concentrations of Black and Hispanic students and higher suspension rates. Substitute teachers said the biggest factor driving their choice of least-preferred school was student behavior.
The problem of inequitable distribution of substitute teachers is likely to grow as districts continue to feel the effects of the pandemic, Liu said. As state legislatures cut K-12 funding in an effort to shore up budget shortfalls, disadvantaged districts will be left with even fewer resources than before, he said.
Some non-teaching duties pushed aside
On the morning of Nov. 16, Rachel Blackmon, a librarian at Riverside Middle School, pulled into the school’s parking lot, wondering if she might be able to do library work that day. Blackmon is on intermittent leave under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. That allows her to come to school two or three days a week and stay home with her son the rest of the week. Every day she’d been on campus since students returned to school in person, she’d had to cover classes for teachers who had either tested positive for the virus or been asked to quarantine.
As she sat in her car in the school parking lot, a school staff member walked over and waved to her. Blackmon rolled down her window, and the other woman handed her a list of classes she was assigned to cover that day.
Blackmon said she doesn’t mind helping cover classes for teachers who are out. The students have been exceptionally good this year, she said, and someone needs to do it. But she doesn’t see much use in having those students at school in person. Anytime she covers a class, she brings those students into the library, sits them down at a safe distance from each other and helps them log into Google Classroom. Then, the students spend an hour and a half doing all their class work online, the same way they would if they were at home.
Meanwhile, Blackmon can’t do the work she’s supposed to be doing, she said. At the beginning of the school year, school leaders identified taking inventory of all the materials in the library as a top priority. Blackmon has barely begun work on the inventory. The school’s leadership understands she can’t cover classes and do inventory at the same time, she said, and no one seems to expect her to have the job done anytime soon. But that inventory is important to the maintenance of the library, she said. If it doesn’t get done, she has no way of knowing what materials the library has and what it’s lost.
Blackmon said she’s one of many school staff members who have taken on extra work to help get the school through a crisis. She’s seen coaches do administrative work, librarians step in as hall monitors and teachers take on multiple classes at once. While she said it’s been “beautiful to witness” everyone find ways to help, it also means many of those staff members’ jobs are going undone. Coaches can’t coach, librarians can’t offer the services they typically would and teachers are spread so thin they can’t teach effectively, she said.
Ultimately, she said, when teachers and school staff members are pulled in too many directions to do their jobs well, students and their families lose the most.
