While news headlines around education are often focused on teacher shortages, I haven’t found as much buzz about the huge drop of substitute teachers post-pandemic.  In my personal experience of substitute teaching over the past year, if I wanted to substitute teach every day of the week, I could have with the number of substitute teaching assignments that popped up during the school year.  

I was curious to find more information about the substitute staffing levels, and was able to find salary data for California school districts at Transparent California.  After searching for a few school districts in my area, I downloaded several spreadsheets containing the names, positions and total compensation for public school employees.  There is a separate downloadable spreadsheet for each fiscal year, so I decided to take a closer look at data before the pandemic and after.  For the larger districts, there were thousands of employees, including Principals,Teachers, Psychologists, Special Ed Resources, Custodians and Behavior Specialists.  I used a pivot table to summarize statistics around substitute teachers, and when I compared both the number of subs along with total substitute pay, the results really surprised me.

In the San Jose Unified School district, which serves over 25,000 students, the number of substitute teachers in 2021 was 303, a whopping 50% drop from 605 substitute teachers in 2018.  Meanwhile, total substitute pay was $2.9M for 2021, which was only a 19% drop from $3.6M in 2018.  The Palo Alto Unified School district showed a similar trend, where the total number of substitute teachers dropped 38% from 2018 to 2021, yet total substitute pay also dropped only 19%.  What I can see in the data are fewer substitutes picking up more hours during the school year.  I suspect that with the declining number of substitutes, there are times when schools struggle to find a substitute, resulting in less than ideal situations for students, like combined classes or other staff members getting pulled in to cover classrooms.

When I attended a training session for substitute teachers in the SF Bay Area, the trainer mentioned that the best way to support teachers is to become a substitute teacher.  By having a ready bench of subs, teachers are able to take the days they need for professional development, medical appointments or just a mental health day.  And that might be a start to addressing the high degree of burnout the teaching profession is facing today.