It’s 5 a.m. on a weekday, and Judy Mallardo is already behind her desk at the School District 54 offices in Schaumburg, checking an answering machine where teachers have called in sick. Then she and a co-worker consult index books and card files, pick up their phones and start waking up substitute teachers, penciling an “X” in a ledger for every classroom they fill.
The state’s largest elementary-only school district uses between 80 and 100 substitutes a day. Although Mallardo can assign subs to most of the classrooms before the pupils’ day begins, she can’t fill them all because there aren’t enough subs available or willing to work.
It forces principals, teachers and other administrators to cover classes for an hour or two during their spare time, aggravating an already disrupted school day.
Similar scenes are repeated every morning all over the country as schools struggle with a nationwide substitute-teacher shortage that hinders learning in countless classrooms.
But District 54 has just been offered a chance to let someone else take on the headache: a temporary employment agency.
A Massachusetts-based staffing company says it will open a Chicago-area office if it can land a contract with Community Consolidated School District 54.
For a fee, the company promises to recruit, hire and deploy a small army of qualified substitutes wherever and whenever they’re needed.
Only a handful of school districts in the U.S. have hired temporary-service agencies to find substitutes, none in the Chicago area. So school officials such as those in District 54 question whether the dramatically higher cost of hiring a temp service will be worthwhile, and whether an outside agency can really do a better job.
In fact, the company courting District 54, Wakefield, Mass.-based OPIS, a subsidiary of British temp giant Select Holdings Inc., had problems initially with late checks and scheduling confusion, according to some Northeast school officials who worked with it. But the agency has improved, the officials say.
Meanwhile, other major temporary agencies are joining the trend.
Currently about 10 percent of the nation’s classrooms are staffed by substitutes, according to Staffing Industry Report, a trade publication. However, a strong economy in recent years has depleted the pool of subs by creating a host of well-paying jobs. Many would-be subs have opted for steady employment in non-teaching posts.
At the same time, a nationwide teacher shortage has made it worse, as many substitutes have taken full-time teaching jobs.
The result: Teachers, certified teachers’ aides or even school administrators have to be shuffled around to fill in as subs. Classes are rarely canceled, but school officials say the practice robs teachers of the time they usually spend preparing for class.
And elementary students don’t learn well when they see several faces in a day, District 54 Deputy Associate Supt. Kenneth Cull said.
“Every time we don’t fill a sub, that impacts a lot of people,” he said.
The Chicago Public Schools, which employs about 26,000 full-time teachers, averages 1,200 teacher absences a day but can find only 980 subs, spokeswoman Nina O’Neil said.
Area school districts have tried a variety of techniques to attract more substitutes: running “Subs Wanted” ads, raising wages, hiring permanent substitutes to float between classrooms in a school, even seeking waivers from a state law that prevents school districts from using a substitute more than 90 days a year in one district.
But the shortage remains.
The temp agencies are betting that school districts will gladly pay a fee–as much as 40 percent above what districts currently pay for subs, according to industry reports–to ensure a steady supply of qualified substitutes.
One industry report projects substitute-teacher staffing could blossom into a $2.5 billion-a-year business.
OPIS will make a formal proposal to District 54 board members at a meeting Feb. 3.
Meanwhile, officials with Troy, Mich.-based Kelly Services said they too have begun trying to woo districts in the Chicago area since launching a substitute-teacher staffing service on Nov. 1.
Nationally, substitutes make an average of $64 a day. District 54 spends about $1.4 million a year on substitutes, who are paid $85 a day.
If OPIS were to strike a deal with District 54, company officials said the agency would want exclusive control over the district’s substitute staffing. OPIS would take over all responsibility for recruiting, screening (based on the district’s teaching requirements), hiring, training, criminal-background checks, payroll and scheduling.
A temp agency would have an advantage over individual school districts in obtaining substitutes not only because it could be more aggressive and broad in its recruiting, but also because once they were hired, substitutes would not be limited to working within one district.
The firm would pay subs whatever school districts pay them now, said Albert Cormier, an educational consultant for OPIS. It also would offer benefits–insurance, bonuses, vacation pay–and would accommodate those subs who only want to work on specific days or at specific schools. The company also would try to guarantee subs a full week of work by shuffling them among school districts, he said.
Polly Frizzell has worked for OPIS since last fall, when the company signed a contract with Fall Mountain Regional High School, where she has been subbing for the past 10 years.
At first, she said, she was unhappy with OPIS, which seemed disorganized.
“I wasn’t getting my paycheck, and I was getting called three times for the same job by different people,” she said.
But in the past few months, the job has been just as smooth as it was when she worked for the district.
“If you asked me now, I’m quite happy,” she said.
Donald McGee, a substitute in Springfield, Vt., said that before signing with OPIS, he would work two to three times a week, but now is happily working five. He also is occasionally offered jobs at a choice of schools.
Kelly Services decided to launch Kelly Educational Staffing after getting encouraging results from experimental contracts with a few school districts in Louisiana and Mississippi.
“It takes our core competency and applies it to school districts,” said Teresa Setting, Kelly’s director of product management. “We think it’s a perfect fit.”
OPIS now has just a few offices in the Boston area but plans to expand rapidly, Cormier said. The company has approached Chicago-area school districts in addition to District 54, he said, although he declined to say which ones.
Some experts see the convergence of school districts and temp agencies as a no-brainer: After all, they say, what are substitute teachers if not temporary employees? And who is more experienced at the challenges of recruiting and managing temporary employees than temp agencies?
“I think it’ll take off,” said Geoffrey Smith, executive director of Utah State University’s Substitute Teaching Institute in Logan, Utah. “School districts are in the business of educating and not necessarily in the business of temp employment.”
Bob Ingraffia, assistant superintendent for the Suburban Cook County Regional Office of Education, acknowledged the substitute-teacher shortage as a “critical” problem. His office has held seminars for officials from the 143 districts in his region on how to recruit and manage subs.
“I would imagine it would make things a little easier” if temp agencies handled subs, he said.
However, the idea also has its drawbacks, some educators say.
Ingraffia doubts most school districts would be able to afford the fees a temp agency would have to charge to make a profit.
“Nobody gets into education to make a killing,” he said.
Some substitute teachers said they were worried they would lose their state retirement benefits if they became OPIS employees.
Added Karen Strykowski, a substitute teacher at District 54’s Dirksen School: “I don’t want to be a part of a substitute mill, and I get the impression that that’s what this company would be like.”
Some substitute-teaching advocates say they don’t want the negative portrayal that goes with being a temp. And they fear staffing companies will lower their wages and ignore pleas for better working conditions.
“I don’t see it’s really in the interests of subs,” said Shirley Kirsten, founder and president of the 300-member Fresno (Calif.) Area Substitute Teachers Association, one of the nation’s first independent substitute teacher unions.
Superintendents of several Northeast U.S. school districts that entered into contracts with OPIS last fall said the service was rocky and inconsistent at first: Many teacher absences went unfilled; and, in one case, subs didn’t get their paychecks on time.
But in November and December, the company’s record improved as its recruitment efforts paid off, they said.
Joe Silver, superintendent of the 1,700-student K-12 Springfield School District in Vermont, said OPIS had saturated local airwaves with radio ads beckoning substitutes.
“They are already filling many more sub positions than we could on our own,” he said. “A few people probably said they liked it better the good old way. But the good old way wasn’t working for the school district.”
