Despite what the district calls its aggressive hiring and recruiting of substitute teachers, the Bellevue School District is facing increase in unfilled teacher absences in schools across the city.
Between 2013 and 2015, the rate of unfilled absences — those where a a substitute could not be found to cover a teacher’s courses for the day — increased from 1.8 percent to 5.8 percent, according to district data.
The district added 60 additional substitute teachers to their rotation this year, but still have a gap in covering teachers’ fall absences, which increased by 12.12 percent from 2013 to 2015.
Concerns over the substitute shortcomings were first publicly brought to the Bellevue School Board’s attention in November, when teachers spoke of the impact on standard and speciality educators.
“I have seen teachers be evaluated on their teaching skills when teaching one and a half classes on a moment’s notice. I’ve seen administrators be frequently torn away from other responsibilities in order to substitute teach with almost no notice,” said Spiritridge Elementary School teacher Kelye Kneeland. “This school year has been a huge challenge in relation to the substitute shortage.”
Others voiced concern for the impact on so-called “speciality” classes such as physical education, art, music and library. International School Band Director Andy Rubesch told the school board that the substitute shortage was pulling specialist instructors away from their classes to cover teacher absences, often leading to weeks-long gaps in instruction.
“Our primary concern is not the substitute shortage — which we all recognize as a problem — but that the practice of relying on specialists to act as emergency subs seems to be more and more commonplace and an accepted practice by building principals,” he said.
In response, the district’s Executive Director of Human Resources Jeffrey Thomas conducted a survey last month of existing Bellevue substitute teachers and assured the school board that the district was not just sitting idly by.
“We have been very aggressive in hiring substitutes and also in hiring teachers,” he said. “There really is a teacher coverage challenge. Because when you look at the data that we presented, we’ve done more around recruitment of substitutes than we’ve done in several years and we increased the number of substitutes in our active pool by 60 this year.”
Over the last two years, the district has expanded recruitment, increased pay and created incentivized pay for substitute teachers.
Those reasons, in addition to the convenience and climate/culture of Bellevue schools were the top reasons that substitutes surveyed reported that they chose to substitute in Bellevue. Substitutes overwhelmingly have nothing but positive things to say about working in the district and over 98 percent said they would recommend other substitutes do so, Thomas reported.
The district is aiming to reduce the unfilled absence rate to below 4.5 percent by January 31, then below three percent by March 1. The key to remedying the substitute gap is increasing the number of substitutes but also managing teacher absences, including the dramatic growth in the use of personal and professional development leave over the last two years, he said.
