Lately, when I’ve walked into my Intro to Engineering Design class, I’ve seen a message scrawled on the whiteboard with an Expo marker. As I write this, it reads “day 102.” That’s a count of the number of weekdays, including ones without school, where my Engineering class has had no teacher.
Let’s go back to October 5. That’s when Ms. Smith, my teacher, told the class that she was moving to take a job at the Canyons School District in Utah. Let’s go back to October 29, which was her last day officially as our teacher. Let’s go back to the week after that, when we all thought that there would be a permanent teacher showing up soon and were told that there was at least one strong candidate.
In those 102 days, my class has received some instruction. Ms. Smith left us a few assignments. Then Mr. Vincent and Mr. Pudlo, who have their own classes to teach this period, provided us further assignments, including a group challenge to design an effective manufacturing process for a puzzle cube and work modeling parts of a toy car. But still, it’s not what I came into this class expecting.
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And I’m not alone in this experience. The school is experiencing a number of teacher vacancies, including not just the one in Engineering but also three in the Spanish department. Assistant principal Brandon Patterson believes that there are currently about 10 teacher vacancies, including teachers on long-term leave as well as those who left East.
When I first began to ask students for interviews for this story, I found no shortage of students without a teacher. Sophomore Mollie Cleary, however, is missing a teacher in two of her classes: the same Engineering class that I am in as well as her Spanish IV class.
“I’m in these two elective courses to actually learn and know the material,” Cleary said. “And I’m not able to do that. I’m really scared about the courses that I have to do next year [and] that I want to continue to do, but I might not have the knowledge to do well on them.”
This concern resonates with many other students. Senior Rahul Niranjan said that students in his seventh period AP Spanish Literature class have become less likely to take the AP exam because they view getting a good score on it without a teacher as a lost cause. Though Niranjan himself still plans to take the exam, he is not sure whether he will do well on it.
How much students are learning in classes without a teacher depends to some extent on the class. Cleary said that another Spanish teacher sometimes teaches her class, but that our Engineering class has had “maybe one” assignment during the third quarter.
Junior Darya Loiko compared the same Engineering class to a “free period,” wording Niranjan also used in reference to his Spanish class. For her, that means that she has come to assume that there will be no work in it. Still, shortly after Smith left, Loiko found that the class presented problems for time management because she never knew how much work would be assigned.
Patterson, the assistant principal, said that there is a plan to provide some help for Spanish classes, including outside resources, but that he can’t reveal the full details until an upcoming email is sent out. However, other classes are a bit different.
“We have some classes in the Special Education department [without a teacher], there isn’t really a way to fill that void until we have those individuals in the building,” Patterson said.
One further idea that Patterson said has received consideration is the idea of a “bridge course,” or a class over the summer to help students without a teacher who are behind.
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The teacher shortage hasn’t just been affecting students and their learning. It’s also affected the rest of the school.
“I don’t mind watching a class here or there,” said French teacher Molly Brooks, who has been substituting mostly for Spanish classes. “But it’s been exhausting on me, too, because I’ve been watching seven periods a day, teaching my five and then watching two a day pretty much since November, on and off, and I’m frankly just exhausted, so I’ve stopped doing twice a day.”
Patterson said that the number of teachers out on any given day, including those long-term vacancies, has exceeded 20 on some days, although it is normally less. At the same time, the school district is trying to hire more people to be substitute teachers, but Patterson said that there are not enough substitutes to handle all the vacancies on some days.
The administration is also short-handed because of the departure of principal Ken Proulx in December and assistant principal Ileana Herrera in January. Patterson said that, while he is thankful to Lincoln Center for sending extra help, he still isn’t fully satisfied with how much he has been able to be available to students and staff.
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To handle the teacher shortage, a stipend of $45 per hour is now being provided for teachers who cover for another teacher.
“I think it’s a pretty fair compensation,” Brooks said. “I have covered classes here and there for many years for colleagues as favors, but there was never any compensation. So it’s really great that the district is finally valuing our time.”
Brooks said that she was motivated by the compensation, but also by her desire to help out the students without a teacher.
Patterson said that, in order to stop there from being more teacher vacancies, “we do the same thing we do every other day… creating a school environment that works for staff and works for students, with a focus on safety and learning.”
The administration also hopes to find more long-term substitutes who can stay with the same class for a while. According to Patterson, some classes already have those long-term substitutes. Patterson also said that the school has been trying to bring back some retired people with background knowledge of engineering to fill the specific vacancy in Engineering.
The search continues for that Engineering position, as well as many others, including the vacancies in the Spanish department. Patterson said that some candidates have been brought in for interviews but have either taken other jobs or have not been chosen by the school. The Human Resources department of CHCCS has also been looking for more candidates.
Brooks, who was hired by CHCCS after a job fair she attended while studying Education at the University of Michigan, said, “I think they need to up their recruitment outside of the immediate area in order to pull some people down here.”
She believes that students being “less respectful,” distractions created by using technology, and a lack of pay and respect for teachers have all contributed to fewer people wanting to enter the profession, causing these current shortages. However, she also thinks that a lack of connection between the hiring process and teachers at East has also contributed to the dilemma.
“[Lincoln Center] needs to come here and see what’s happening, that kids have been sitting in a classroom for three months with no teacher. That really needs to be on the forefront of both parents and the school board and Lincoln Center’s minds, that that’s really a disservice to students,” Brooks said.
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I’m writing a lot of this story in my Engineering class, since I have no work there. To be honest, I don’t mind that. I like having time to write for the ECHO, and I’m not planning to study engineering any further.
But at the same time, in the first week of that class, we were all told what was going to happen throughout the year. Much of that hasn’t happened, in a process mysterious to many of my classmates. For me and my peers, we still don’t know when or how we will be taught, over 100 days after Ms. Smith first left.
