Kelly Rhoden, the principal at Nevada Union High School, spent her morning Monday scrambling to find substitutes for her absent teachers.

The school, about 60 miles northeast of Sacramento, has 86 teachers. Thirteen were out on Monday.

“We have quite a few teachers out either because they’ve tested positive, they’re symptomatic, or they have their own children who are in quarantine,” she said. “At the end of the day, we just don’t have enough substitutes.”

Across California, the substitute teacher shortage is another burden in an already challenging school year. Administrators are taking desperate steps to make sure there’s an adult in the classroom when teachers are absent, resorting to using non-teaching staff who have their own critical responsibilities during the typical school day, especially during the first fully in-person school year of the pandemic.

Nevada Union High and the rest of the Nevada Joint Union High School District share a pool of substitute teachers with eight other districts in Nevada County. Last year, the pool was stretched so thin that Nevada Joint Union shut down schools due to a sub shortage. District officials are worried it’ll happen again.

“Last October, we had to go back to distance learning because I ran out of substitutes,” said Brett McFadden, superintendent of Nevada Joint Union High. “Not because we didn’t have enough protective equipment. I ran out of adults.”

McFadden said even he has had to sub for a class.

According to County Superintendent Scott Lay, the county went from having about 200 substitute teachers before the pandemic to less than 70 today. As a result, principals like Rhoden are forced to place counselors and administrators in classrooms. Even then, Rhoden fell short three substitutes on Monday.

The substitute shortage is worsened by an underlying teacher shortage. Several district officials interviewed by CalMatters said they started the school year with some classrooms being assigned a long-term substitute.

In hopes of attracting more subs, districts have increased their pay rates, triggering similar raises at neighboring districts. But administrators say money won’t create more educators.

“You get to a point where you’re just begging and borrowing people from all over the district,” McFadden said. “I love my students dearly, but I’m not gonna leave 30 of them alone in a room.”

How bad is the sub shortage?

California has seen declining numbers of new substitute teachers every year, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the agency that licenses full-time and substitute teachers.

In the 2018-19 school year, the agency issued about 64,000 substitute teaching permits. In 2020-21, it issued close to 47,000.

Prospective substitute teachers need to hold a bachelor’s degree and meet the “basic skills requirement” either by providing a standardized test score or by having B’s or better in college-level reading, writing and mathematics courses.

“It’s not terrifically challenging to get a sub permit in California,” said Mary Sandy, the executive director of the Commission on Teacher Credentialing. “But the need is utterly critical.”

At San Bernardino City Unified, the number of substitutes at the district’s disposal shrank from 1,000 before the pandemic to 700.

Marcus Funchess, who oversees human resources for the district, said only about 92% of teacher absences are covered each day.

“Right now our substitute teacher shortage is a concern due to the number of teachers who might need to quarantine,” he said. “On one day we could have up to 45 jobs uncovered.”

Why is the substitute teacher force shrinking?

Aaron Estrada, a substitute in the Chula Vista Elementary School District, said many substitutes left the profession last year because the pay wasn’t worth the risk of being surrounded by unvaccinated students and staff.

“It’s difficult to try to make a living off substitute teaching,” he said. “For a lot of people, it didn’t seem worth it.”

Some school districts, especially those in rural communities, rely heavily on retired teachers to work as substitutes. But for those older educators, the risk of returning to the classroom is even greater.

“Retirees have their own fears,” said Rhoden, the principal at Nevada Union High. “They want to keep their own health at the forefront.”

Mike Teng, CEO of Swing Education, a company that helps over 200 school districts find substitute teachers, said the sub shortage is consistent with staff shortages in the service sector.

“It’s tough. Substitute teachers have left and haven’t come back,” he said. “And we’re potentially trying to compete with all the other industries for workers.”

Rosi Martinez, the president of the local teachers union at Chula Vista Elementary, said former substitute teachers are reluctant to return because they’re making more money from unemployment benefits.

“At one point we were only filling about half of teacher absences,” she said. “That’s pretty much unheard of.”

Rising pay and lowering barriers

In an effort to entice substitute teachers back into the classroom, the administration at the Chula Vista Elementary School District held an emergency meeting in early August to increase pay for subs.

The district increased pay for short-term subs from $122 to $200 a day. For long-term substitutes, the pay went from $180 to $283 a day. In response, the neighboring Sweetwater Union High School District increased its rate from $160 to $240 a day.

“You can say it’s a bidding war, but that’s just the market,” Teng said. “But substitute teachers still aren’t paid enough.”

Elk Grove Unified has proposed raising its substitute pay rates, especially for current and retired teachers and counselors. These substitutes could make $350 a day, once the district’s school board approves the raises.

At San Bernardino City Unified, the district gave substitutes a 2% raise and paid $12,000 for digital billboards to advertise its substitute positions on the freeways. Funchess said the district would increase pay if this aggressive advertising campaign doesn’t attract enough substitutes.

Apart from raising pay, district leaders said the Commission for Teacher Credentialing could take steps to remove other barriers like the $100 fee and the requirement for a bachelor’s degree.

“We could use any temporary reprieve,” Funchess said. “Some other states don’t require a bachelor’s degree to be a substitute teacher. It’s worth a discussion here.”

A sub shortage on top of a teacher shortage

The substitute shortage is just a symptom of an ongoing teacher shortage, according to district administrators. Because some districts across the state started the school year with unfilled teaching positions, some students have only had a substitute teacher in the weeks since school started.

In the 2020-21 school year, 13,558 of California’s teachers retired, 1,000 more than the previous year, according to data from the California State Teachers’ Retirement System.

Mary Sandy at the Commission on Teacher Credentialing said the agency must credential about 20,000 teachers a year to keep up with the staffing needs of districts across the state. Last year, only about 14,000 teachers received their credentials.

And while this year’s state budget includes a historic amount of funding for California’s schools, no amount of money can overcome the bottom line of a personnel shortage.

At Nevada Joint Union High School District, Superintendent Brett McFadden said despite raising the daily rate from $100 to $150 per day, finding substitutes continues to be a challenge especially in more rural and remote parts of the county.

“I don’t have a money problem,” he said. “I have a resource problem.”

Until district and state officials find more effective ways to recruit qualified teachers, principals like Rhoden will start their days rushing to put an adult in every classroom.

“I don’t know if another pay raise would work to be honest,” Rhoden said. “I just don’t think there’s enough teachers out there.”

— Joe is the K-12 education reporter for CalMatters. His stories use data to highlight inequities in California’s public schools. Before joining CalMatters in June 2021, he was the education reporter at KPBS, the public media station in San Diego. Previously, he covered the schools in the Coachella Valley for The Desert Sun, a daily newspaper in Palm Springs. He has a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from the University of California, Irvine and a master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School.

by Mark Hedin

Ethnic Media Services

California voters have less than two weeks to decide if Gov. Gavin Newsom should be kicked out of office and, if so, which of 46 candidates would be better suited for the job.

For those who vote in the Sept. 14 election, the process is relatively simple. The ballot has only two questions. Those questions, although both related to the recall, are independent of each other.

In the first question, you can vote for or against the recall. You could ignore the second question, which offers you a choice between 46 potential next governors, if that first question gets a majority “yes” vote.

Similarly, you can sidestep that first question of whether you want to fire Gov. Newsom, and in response to the second question simply state your preference from among the 46 candidates to replace him, again, if the vote to recall succeeds.

Voting is already under way.

On Aug. 30, California Black Media and Ethnic Media services hosted a press briefing to address any confusion over how the recall election process works.

Raphe Sonenshein, Executive Director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles, provided a history of the recall process by which elected officials in California can be removed, and California Secretary of State Shirley Nash Weber, the state’s top elections official, answered questions about how this election is being conducted.

In hopes of making things as clear as she could, Sonenshein emphasized that a “no” vote for the recall would be a vote in support of Newsom, whereas a “yes” vote would be to end his time as governor.

With the recent mailing out of absentee/mail-in ballots to registered voters statewide, he said, it’s “a two-week election.”

“The real ballgame,” Sonenshein said, “is in that first question. That’s the history maker.”

Voter turnout is expected to be a decisive factor in the election. This is what is known in political circles as an “off year,” in which neither Congressional, Senate nor presidential elections are on the ballot. Typically, off-year elections attract much less interest and many fewer voters.

“This is a meat and potatoes election,” Sonenshein said. “You know what this is about? Who sent their ballot in!”

So far, he said, “early voting is coming in at very high levels,” particularly among older voters, as is generally the case.

Voters age 65 or older had already cast ballots at a 35% rate, he said, and the percentage is even higher among those age 71 and up. But “there’s a lot of work to be done,” he said. Voters age 18-34, he said, have so far been responding at a very low level.

Although ballots don’t precisely indicate the race or ethnicities of those who cast them, in estimates of voting so far, Sonenshein said, “White voters are overrepresented and Latino voters underrepresented.”

He recommended free daily updates on voter participation available from the organization Political Data Intelligence.

Weber described various aspects of the voting process.

She discussed how there will be cameras monitoring the tabulation process, wherein a machine separates the ballots from envelopes, and what to do if your ballot is lost or spoiled (contact local registrar of voters).

And you can track the progress of your vote once you’ve cast it at her office’s website.

“This is such an important election,” she said. “Whatever you do,” she said, “be sure you vote for number one” (the first question, about whether or not to recall the governor), “because that really starts whether there’s going to be a recall or not.”

The state will tally up the votes for the replacement governor, she said, even if the recall vote is defeated: “We’ll count the votes, but it’s immaterial.”

The recall process was first devised in Los Angeles County in the late 1800s, Sonenshein said. It proved popular in local districts across the state, along with the initiative process to create new legislation and the referendum process to eliminate them. In 1911, California made all three processes available statewide.

In the 110 years since then, Sonenshein said, there have been 179 attempted recalls of state officials, but only 11 of them got enough petition signatures to qualify for the ballot.

One of the unique things about this “critically, urgently  important” 2021 recall election, Sonenshein said, is that a court last year gave recall petition signature-gatherers an extra four months to get the recall qualified to be on the ballot, in light of COVID-19 pandemic-related difficulties in gathering signatures.

An inexplicable oddity of California’s original 1911 recall legislation, Sonenshein said, is that the election for someone to replace someone being subjected to the recall is conducted simultaneously, and “it is incredibly easy to become a candidate.”

But for elected officials facing a recall, he said, “it’s terrifying!”

To get on the ballot, a would-be governor has to pay a $3,500 filing fee, or gather 10,000 signatures from a political party. Most pay the fee.