Superintendents, principals and counselors are filling in as substitute teachers due to the recent surge of COVID-19 cases due to the omicron variant, and increasing already existing staffing shortages.
Brenda Cassellius, superintendent of Boston schools, tweeted she was filling in for a fifth grade teacher. While Vince Matthews, superintendent of San Francisco schools, was filling in as a substitute sixth grade science teacher.
“This is the most challenging time in my 36 years as an educator,” Matthews said Thursday. “We’re trying to educate students in the middle of a pandemic while the sands around us are consistently shifting.”
Matthews has even asked for all employees with teaching credentials to take a class during these staffing shortages. 600 of the district’s 3,600 teachers were out Thursday, causing for some classrooms to be combined due to the staffing shortages.
Dozens of employees from the central office in Cincinnati were sent to schools at risk of closing due to low staffing this week. While schools in Atlanta, Detroit, and Milwaukee had to temporarily switch from in-person learning to virtual learning.
It has become incredibly hard for teachers to get classrooms back up and running to the way they were before the pandemic.
“I had a friend say to me, ‘You know, three weeks ago we were locking our doors because of school shootings again, and now we’re opening the window for COVID.’ It’s really all a bit too much,” Meghan Hatch-Geary, an English teacher at Woodland Regional High School in Connecticut, said. “This year, trying to fix everything, trying to be everything for everyone, is more and more exhausting all the time.”
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Classes were cancelled in Chicago after the teachers union voted to refuse in-person learning. Union leaders have been pushing for flexibility with virtual learning and more testing for COVID-19.
“All of these additional burdens and stresses on top of being worried about getting sick, on top of being stressed like all of us are to after a two-year pandemic … it just compounded to put us in a place that we are now,” Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said.
Pittsburgh second grade teacher Anna Tarka-DiNunzio’s school of about 200 students was forced to go virtual because of staffing shortages this week. She added that some teachers still taught while being sick with the virus.
“It’s not just people calling off. It’s people who are sick or who have family members who are sick,” Tarka-DiNunzio said.
Students are missing from classrooms just as much as teachers. In New Haven, teachers say some classes have only been about half full. Jonathan Berryman, a music teacher, is concerned for his students that have missed a lot of time.
“Before omicron came along, there was fairly smooth sailing. Now the ship has been rocked,” Berryman said. “We get to make midyear adjustments in our evaluation system. And some I’m sure are wondering whether we should even be concerned about that academic progress piece.”
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