Colorado school districts have ramped up recruiting efforts as they try to staff classrooms amid a nationwide substitute teacher shortage and are targeting one specific demographic in their calls for help: parents.
Schools asked parents to help in their buildings even before the pandemic, but officials in Denver metro districts said their outreach has increased as their need for more workers has grown. The shortage of substitute teachers is so severe that several schools in the area temporarily moved to remote learning or canceled classes this fall.
“We’ve always recruited parents; that’s always been a market,” said Lacey Nelson, director of talent acquisition for Denver Public Schools. “For the ones who have the ability, it’s a great solution.”
Still, Nelson said, school administrators are finding that the pool of parents, guardians and grandparents who can step in as substitute teachers is not as large as they once expected because parents often hold other jobs and are facing the same childcare challenges as the ones partly attributing to long-time subs and teachers leaving their jobs.
And parents described the process of getting a substitute license as cumbersome and lengthy, saying the requirements — including the cost — create barriers to becoming a substitute teacher.
Erin Phelan, of Denver, frequently volunteers at her two children’s school, Bromwell Elementary, and serves as membership chair of the Parent Teacher Association — a role that has made her the de facto volunteer coordinator for the school as she helps schedule parents to supervise lunch and recess periods, and staff the front office.
Phelan considered getting a substitute license last year because of the staffing shortages, but cited too many steps and being unsure she’d be assigned to her children’s school. Going to another school would create new problems in having no one to watch her children while she filled a teaching need elsewhere.
“I’m not going to even bother with this because it’s not going to work for our family,” Phelan said of her decision.
Instead, she continues to volunteer at Bromwell where about 40 parent volunteers run the school’s library, which closed when classes moved online at the start of the pandemic.
When the school reopened, it had to use money previously allocated for the library to fund small-group instruction, principal Valecia von Weise said.
Colorado Department of Education and school district officials acknowledged the process can be difficult and vary by district, but said they have sought to make it easier to become a substitute teacher by lowering hiring standards, increasing pay and offering bonuses.
“We weren’t valuing the substitutes enough,” said Mike Gradoz, assistant superintendent of human resources for Boulder Valley School District.
The district is offering $250 signing bonuses to help cover the cost of getting a substitute license and to get fingerprinted.
The Department of Education revised its requirements for a one-year substitute license so that a person who doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree but wants to fill in can apply with the agency without a verification form from a school district as long as they have been fingerprinted and have experience working with children, agency spokesman Jeremy Meyer said in an email.
An applicant with the state also must pass a background check. Those seeking a 3-year or 5-year-certification must have at least a bachelor’s degree. School districts may have other requirements. DPS, for example, requires new substitutes without teaching experience to attend classroom management training online.
Officials with the Denver and Boulder school districts said they are starting to see the reward from their changes in incentives and recruitment efforts as more people have signed up to become substitutes within recent weeks.
Neither school district tracks how many of their substitute teachers are also parents of schoolchildren. In early October, Denver Public Schools had about 27 parents ask about becoming a substitute within hours of Superintendent Alex Marrero sending a message to families about the need. The district has hired about 300 new substitutes since July, and of those 120 were hired after the October email, Nelson said.
“Our parents, our families, are listening,” she said. “A big portion of our hires have come in the last month in a half.”
Boulder Valley School District has also experienced an increase in hiring. The district’s pool of active substitutes increased from 360 people at the start of the school year to 750, Gradoz said.
And overall, the state Department of Education has issued 7,575 substitute licenses as of October — 933 more than last year.
One of those new subs was Katy Goebel, of Denver, who said she wanted to go back to work but remain flexible when her children returned to in-person classes in early 2021 because she wasn’t sure how long schools would remain open in the spring.
Goebel, who is a former teacher, decided to apply to substitute teach at her children’s school, Willow Elementary.
“It worked out really nicely to have that as a way to help,” Goebel said.
She continues to fill in about three or four times a month since school started back this fall, saying the need is so great that she could work as a substitute five days a week if she wanted.
“There are dozens of jobs and many unfilled,” Goebel said.
Tamara McCarty, of Lafayette, said she decided to get a substitute license so that she can fill in when needed during theater rehearsals. Her daughter, Arianna, a senior at Centaurus High School, is president of the school’s theater company.
Both the director and assistant director missed rehearsals one day in September and the students were left without an adult available to supervise as they ran through scenes of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.”
McCarty was allowed to fill in, but a staff member also helped out because she didn’t have a substitute license. To make sure she can step in if needed again, she got her license and is now applying with Boulder Valley to become a substitute teacher, McCarty said.
‘This is (Arianna’s) last year so it’s really important,” she said, adding, “It’s great if parents can step in and help so we can keep the schools open and as safe as possible.”
The staffing shortages, while they have improved, persist. The districts’ pools of substitutes are still smaller than they were before the pandemic — DPS used to have 1,200 subs and Boulder Valley had 900. And just because someone has signed up as a sub, it doesn’t mean they are always available or willing to fill in when a teacher is out.
The spread of COVID-19 is cited as a concern for some, especially in the current wave of virus infections in children and teens, especially those ages 5 to 11 who have experienced higher rates of illness than previously in the pandemic.
And some districts are finding that teachers are absent more often this semester than before, largely due to quarantining after exposure to the coronavirus, being diagnosed with COVID-19 or caring for someone with the illness, said Colleen O’Neil, associate commissioner of educator talent for the state Department of Education.
Teachers are also feeling overwhelmed by trying to get students back on grade-level learning while juggling extra duties — such as lunch monitors or covering other classes amid staffing shortages, she said.
“Somehow people think education is different from all of the other industries that are showing shortages,” O’Neil said. “But I think education is a pretty good reflection of environments, of communities, in general.”
