When Debbie Fery started hearing this year from substitute teachers who had not been paid for time spent taking mandatory trainings, it felt personal.

Fery, treasurer and chair of government affairs for the Oregon Substitute Teachers Association, and a substitute teacher herself, took her own fight to get paid for a required safety training to the state’s Bureau of Labor and Industry back in 2020.

“It’s like no one respects us enough to pay for it,” she said.

All teachers are required to take certain training courses, some each year, and most full-time teachers take the classes during the week before school starts when they’re technically back on the clock. But substitute teachers often have to complete the training when they’re not on the clock.

Many of the courses that districts require substitute teachers to take – on things like cybersecurity, federal academic and health privacy laws and what to do in the event of a school shooting – take no more than a few hours online, and by law, districts must pay substitute teachers for their time. But Fery said many aren’t doing so and that state money set aside for this since 2022 has gone unused.

District officials told the Capital Chronicle that’s because they didn’t need the money.

Fery settled her claim of wage theft with the Willamette Education Service District, 16 of the 21 districts it encompasses and the substitute teacher staffing company Edustaff, all of which had told her they didn’t owe her money for the time she spent taking the online courses in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Following the settlement, the labor bureau wrote a guidance letter to districts and posted it to its website, explaining that by law they needed to pay substitutes for mandatory training. Still, Fery said, district officials have told her and members of the substitute teachers association that they do not need to pay them.

Teacher associations like hers played a critical role in securing state funding in 2022 for districts so they could pay substitute teachers for more than 20 different training classes, many of which are mandatory depending on the district. Less than one-third of Oregon’s 197 school districts and 19 education service districts have used the state money, leading Fery and legislators to wonder how widespread wage theft is for substitutes taking these trainings.

The Capital Chronicle emailed 17 districts that either requested money and did not use it, or did not request any money at all. The few administrators who responded said they tapped into other pots of money to pay substitutes to train, that they did not need the money or that a company that provides them with substitute teachers is responsible for paying them to take required courses.

New task force

State Sen. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, convened in early November the first meeting of a new Joint Task force on Substitute Teachers, of which Fery is a member. It’s looking at a number of issues that’s led to a shortage of substitute teachers statewide and the growing reliance on two private companies – ESS and Edustaff – to provide substitutes to districts.

Dembrow said the task force will consider concerns about wage theft in the coming year. It is slated to provide recommendations to the state Legislature by December of 2025.

Dembrow said he still needs to learn more about why districts have not used the money the state set aside in 2022.

“To be fair to them, if there were problems with the process, we should know that,” he said. “But we need to get to a place where subs are getting paid for the training that they need.”

Fery said she’s heard from more than 30 substitutes in at least 10 districts who have not been paid to take SafeSchools Training, a series of courses intended to show that all teachers are following state and federal safety mandates. She asked several if they would talk with a Capital Chronicle reporter but said they declined out of fear of retribution.

$16 million unspent

Due to a critical shortage of both substitute teachers and fully licensed classroom teachers, the Oregon Legislature in early 2022 passed on teacher licensing and other requirements. It included $100 million in incentives and bonuses to attract and retain teachers, classroom assistants and substitute teachers and $19 million for districts to reimburse classroom assistants and substitute teachers for mandatory training through January of 2024. But districts have spent just $3 million – 15% – of that money, according to data from the Oregon Department of Education. Districts had until the end of July to submit invoices for reimbursement. The remaining $16 million can no longer be spent and will be returned to the Legislature in January, according to the Oregon Department of Education.

Of Oregon’s 197 school districts and 19 education service districts, 93 districts applied to the education department for money and just 53 actually used it.

Administrators in districts that applied but didn’t spend the money, or used far less money than they were allocated told the Capital Chronicle they didn’t need it or as much as they thought. They had substitutes take the training while they were on the clock, they said, or used money from the Student Success Act – meant to boost equity, mental health care and help recover learning time lost during COVID for the state’s highest needs students – to pay them.

Many districts that applied for funding did not submit invoices for reimbursement by July, according to the data from the education department. Some districts ultimately invoiced for just a fraction of the money the state was prepared to give them.

As one example, the West Linn-Wilsonville School District didn’t spend any of the $263,000 it applied for and the state allotted. The Multnomah Education Service District, serving about 100,000 students in eight school districts – including Portland Public, the state’s largest district – didn’t spend any of the more than $194,000 that officials applied for in 2022.

An unnamed media relations official wrote via email that most substitutes took mandatory trainings during work hours and that it used Student Success Act money to pay for any training outside of those hours.

Superintendent Mike Johnson of the Creswell School District near Eugene said the Lane Education Service District provides most of the substitute teachers at Creswell schools and pays for their training. He did apply for $56,250 to pay for SafeSchools Training for classroom teachers and classified staff from the state’s $19 million fund, but in the end, the district only owed $1,300 for training hours, he said. He expensed it to the school’s general fund instead.

In all, the state’s money paid for 11,000 substitutes and classroom assistants to take mandatory training. The average per hour of training across employees was $50.

Of the 11,000, 30% were contracted by a third party service. The two largest in Oregon are ESS and Edustaff. Those companies aren’t allowed to bill the state for training, but they can bill the district for the training hours, and the district can bill the state for reimbursement, according to Fery. She has worked under contract for Edustaff as a substitute and said it is not uniformly paying substitutes to take the training.

The Greater Albany School District was allocated $300,000 from the state, but it never invoiced for reimbursement. Michelle Steinhebel, communications director for the district, said it entered into a contract with Edustaff last year and that officials were under the impression that the company is ensuring the teachers take the SafeSchools courses and paying them for their time.

Attempts by the Capital Chronicle to reach representatives of Edustaff and ESS by phone and email went unanswered.

For Fery, withholding payment for mandatory training is a form of wage theft that is leading to a lack of dignity and respect that perpetuates the state’s teacher shortages.

Dembrow agrees that it is not helping.

“All the steps that we can take to get this workforce the professional recognition that they deserve – that’s what we need to do,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

Almost 90% of respondents to the latest School Pulse Panel survey from the National Center for Education Statistics blame pandemic-related disruptions, including quarantines and staff absences, for the lack of progress. But limited efforts to ramp up tutoring programs could also be a factor.

More than half of public schools reported using high-dosage tutoring to help students make up for lost learning, and many offered tutoring as part of summer learning and enrichment programs this year. 

But experts, including one charged with leading the U.S. Department of Education’s new effort to recruit 250,000 tutors and mentors, offered a degree of skepticism. Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University researcher overseeing the , said that many schools have made strong efforts to provide tutoring. But they also relied largely on teachers, who have been stretched thin because of staffing shortages. 

A June of spending plans in over 5,000 districts, from FutureEd at Georgetown University, showed that 1,258 districts planned to implement tutoring..

“I can believe that half of schools attempted to provide tutoring and did so, at some scale, for some period of time,” he said. “I think it’s unlikely that half of schools have and are sustaining high-dosage tutoring at the scale that is needed or beneficial.”

As schools begin a fourth year touched by the pandemic, the data from almost 860 schools provides a glimpse into what school leaders and families can expect as students return to class. Leaders report significant staff burnout and ongoing concerns about filling both teaching and non-teaching positions. But with many educators saying last school year was the hardest they’ve ever been though, some are choosing to adopt a positive outlook toward the months ahead. 

“I honestly think that when we can get the social element under control — routines … and  breaking cell phone habits — we can get more than a year of material taught at a time,”  Jay Wamstead, an eighth grade math teacher at Campbell Middle School in Smyrna, Georgia, told ����Ӱ��. 

The hardest part of last year, he said, was teachers’ sense of how far behind students were socially. 

“I’m not sure we’ll be back to 2019 levels of ‘normal,’ but last year was insane for me as well as everyone I talked to,” he said.

Six of his math team’s 16 teachers left after last year, including two who taught at the school for over a decade. That means a lot of new faces this fall, and for some school leaders, additional holes to fill. 

‘Urgent needs’ 

Schools have an average of three teacher vacancies, with shortages hitting larger schools and those serving more poor and minority students the hardest, according to the survey. Rodriguez said staff shortages “are acute and they pose urgent needs.” It’s a frequent concern he hears from school and district leaders. 

On average, leaders were also still trying to fill three non-teaching positions, with multiple vacancies in transportation and custodial services. 

But shortages were an before the pandemic. And based on recent Bureau of Labor Statistics , the Pulse Panel data seems high, said Chad Aldeman, policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. If every school had at least six vacancies, that would translate to 600,000 openings nationally. According to the federal data, there were 300,000 openings for both K-12 and higher education in June. 

Regardless, 84% of leaders expect hiring mental health professionals for this fall to be somewhat or very difficult, at a time when educators continue to report greater needs among students.

“It’s clear that we’re facing a youth mental health crisis in communities across our country,” Roberto Rodriquez, assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development at the U.S. Department of Education, said during a call with reporters.

According to the survey, the majority of respondents reported providing mental health services, with more than 40% saying those efforts have been very or extremely effective at addressing students’ needs. 

But the Biden administration aims to do more. Rodriguez touted last week’s White House announcement to make almost $300 million in competitive available for mental health services in schools. Efforts will include adding more counselors, social workers and school psychologists and funding partnerships with higher education to get more people into the field. 

Schools have positions for mental health professionals “that are open for an entire school year that don’t get filled,” said Sasha Pudleski, director of advocacy at AASA, the School Superintendents Association. She added that while schools have expanded telehealth options to address mental health needs, they “would prefer to have someone full time.”

Amanda Fitzgerald, assistant deputy executive director at the American School Counselor Association, said states in the northeast tend to have an oversupply of school counseling graduates, but needs are greater in states such as Arizona, Oklahoma and Colorado.

The new grant programs will be helpful, she said, if they can remove barriers for those who lack full credentials. Some professionals, she said, have a background in mental health, but don’t have a school counselor license, and a lot of high school educators focus on college and career transitions, but lack mental health expertise.

“They don’t want to go back to school to get a similar degree when their end game is to still help people,” she said. 

‘Don’t know what to expect’ 

The survey also sheds light on what school leaders believe have been the most helpful strategies to address learning loss. 

Forty-three percent said high-dosage tutoring — 30-minute, one-on-one or small group sessions at least three times a week — has been very or extremely effective at addressing gaps in students’ learning. About a quarter of respondents said their school also provided a high-quality tutoring model as part of their summer learning programs.   

The majority of respondents said their schools used remedial instruction — covering material from a prior grade level — to address learning gaps, but they didn’t think it was as effective as tutoring. Only about a third found remediation to be very or extremely effective. 

Another aspect of last year that was overwhelming for many teachers was the wide range of student learning needs within one classroom, said Katherine Holden, principal of Talent Middle School in Phoenix, Oregon. 

Federal funds, she said, have made it possible to hire additional staff and purchase materials to give students the specific practice they need. She’s also relieved that she was able to fill all of her open positions and hire  full-time substitutes in case  teachers need to be out.

But she said she’ll have to continue to be “aggressive” about reducing absenteeism so students can benefit.

“We’re probably cautiously optimistic,” she told ����Ӱ��. “But if these last two years have taught us anything it’s that you don’t know what to expect.”

One bill (), passed unanimously by both chambers Monday, would allow retired teachers to return to the classroom through the 2022-2023 school year and still collect their pensions.

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Another measure () would eliminate the requirement for public school employees to live in the state for three years before they are hired. Currently, public school employees can’t reside outside New Jersey unless they have a waiver, largely barring schools from hiring people living in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York.

The measures come as school districts around the state are reporting staffing issues that have led them to return to virtual instruction or close entirely. More than a quarter of New Jersey schools were closed Monday due to COVID-related matters, including staffing shortages,

At  teachers and administrators said longstanding staffing issues have been aggravated by COVID-19.

The bills passed Monday, and dozens of others passed during the final voting session of this legislative session, will now go to Gov. Phil Murphy’s desk. He has until Jan. 18 to sign them.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on and .

Two months into the school year, the 2,800-student district is seeking an extra cafeteria worker, two additional bus drivers and four paraeducators — meaning the school system is operating at about 7 percent below capacity for those roles. Periodically, district administrators have had to fill in as substitute teachers and the transportation director, normally a desk position, has been forced to drive bus routes.

“The impact of a staffing shortage feels more severe this year than it has in the past,” Tukwila Human Resources Director Aaron Draganov told ����Ӱ��, noting that the district recently saw an “unusually high number of retirements,” especially in transportation.

But just a few miles to the northeast, on Mercer Island, the story is completely different.

Located between Seattle and Bellevue in a community that is home to a Microsoft co-founder and numerous retired pro athletes, and where typical home values land around $2 million, according to Zillow, Mercer Island School District has largely avoided such staffing woes. 

“We are not experiencing the same struggles as other districts,” Executive Director of Human Resources Erin Battersby told ����Ӱ��. Over 98 percent of support staff roles in the 4,500-student district are filled, according to data she provided. 

“If you want to talk about staff shortages, we’re probably not the district to talk to, because we’re doing pretty well,” the HR director said.

The contrasting circumstances in the two school systems represent a fissure in staffing patterns well beyond the Seattle area. 

During a school year marked by fears of K-12 labor shortages — with nationwide reports of , superintendents and school cafeterias due to a lack of workers — a new analysis out of Washington state quantifies the depth of disparities in teacher and staff vacancy rates between high- and low-poverty school systems.

The research, published Nov. 9 as a by the Center for Education Data and Research, combed through the job postings listed in three-quarters of Washington school districts, which account for 98 percent of all students in the state.

Poorer districts were in need of paraeducators and transportation workers at roughly twice and three times the rates, respectively, of their more affluent counterparts, the analysis revealed. They were also seeking a higher share of janitors, nurses, special educators and teachers for English language learners, among other roles — posing yet another setback for the very students most in need of catching up on learning missed during the pandemic.

“The shortages are breaking along existing lines of disparity,” Dan Goldhaber, a University of Washington education economist who co-authored the analysis, told ����Ӱ��. 

The data flush out an emerging nationwide picture of school staffing that previously included little systematic accounting of districts’ on-the-ground conditions, instead relying on local anecdotes and high-level numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

“Having the Washington data is absolutely important to understand which types of workers districts are struggling to hire the most,” said Chad Aldeman, policy director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab and a in critiquing coverage and public perception of school staffing shortages.

Teachers for special education and English learning programs were the most sought-after instructional roles, while districts reported that they most needed teacher assistants and athletic coaches as support staff.

Before the pandemic, public K-12 education employed about 8 million workers, according to federal data, but that number fell to a low of 7.3 million during the first half of the 2020-21 school year. The count has since rebounded to about 7.7 million, but the sector has yet to fully make up its pandemic losses. 

Last year, schools that went remote often didn’t need as many bus drivers, janitors or other support roles, explained Aldeman. Now as districts bring those roles back, they have to compete with mega-employers, such as Amazon and Uber. 

This is a “very competitive hiring season,” he said. “It’s definitely an applicant’s market in the sense of, they can be kind of choosy in where they want to go.”

Some of the nation’s largest districts reported hundreds of unfilled positions as of late October. Palm Beach County Schools told ����Ӱ�� that they had 1,044 vacancies, including for 351 teachers. Hillsborough County Public Schools, which includes Tampa Bay, reported 1,274 openings, 432 of which were teaching roles. And Chicago Public Schools said it was still hiring for over 3,400 staff, including 680 teachers.

More affluent districts may have an easier time filling positions because salaries are generally higher and the work is seen as less stressful. But the reasons explaining those vacancies remain blurry. With a huge federal windfall landing on districts’ doorsteps thanks to $122 billion for schools in the American Rescue Plan passed in March, many districts are hiring for new positions that never previously existed in efforts to lower class sizes. 

“We don’t have a good sense of the cause of the job openings,” said Aldeman. “Is it because the high-poverty districts can’t find people, or is it that they’re able to hire more right now?”

Regardless, the disparities in vacancy rates worry Tequilla Brownie, executive vice president of The New Teacher Project. She knows that when under-resourced schools have high shares of empty positions, it can translate into long-lasting instructional deficits for poor students. 

Research from her organization found that, in Arkansas, where teachers are in short supply statewide, students in high-poverty districts were . Black students were five times more likely than white students to attend school in a high-shortage district.

Vacancies have been “overwhelmingly felt” by Black and brown students, she told ����Ӱ��. Now, with shortages continuing to fall along lines of race and class, she fears “kids will not get access to the learning acceleration and the learning recovery that they need because you don’t have enough effective teachers.”

Some districts, however, appear to have broken the mold. In Dallas, teachers receive extra compensation — sometimes netting over $100,000 per year — to work in high-poverty schools. The incentive seems to have helped keep educators around: The district estimates just a 17 percent turnover rate from this past year, down from as high as 23 percent in 2015 (though the most recent figure is a slight bump above its 14 percent rate in 2020). 

“We have highly successful teachers who have proven they can be successful at a lot of [high-needs] schools,” Dallas Superintendent Michael Hinojosa told ����Ӱ��. “That has definitely insulated us in comparison to other major urban districts.”

Rural districts, too, have seen shortages — sometimes more acutely than urban schools. Data from the study out of Washington show rural school systems had higher vacancy rates for special educators than suburban or urban districts, while urban districts had a greater need for science and math teachers. Bus driver, paraeducator and athletic worker shortages were much steeper in rural schools than other districts.

Schools looking to lure high-quality educators, perhaps mimicking the compensation scheme in Dallas, should budget carefully for the long term, advised Aldeman. Extra cash from relief dollars is available now, but it won’t be around forever.

“Thanks to the infusion of federal funds, districts may be tempted to increase base salaries,” he said. “But that short-term thinking could lead to layoffs or other painful decisions when the federal funds run out in a few short years.”

Another strategy for districts to help bolster their teacher corps may revolve around the staff already within the school building, said Brownie. These workers, such as paraprofessionals, who also tend to better represent the diversity of schools’ student bodies than credentialed teachers, can be helped to acquire the skills and training needed to move into full-time instructor roles.

“There definitely are ways that districts, and maybe in partnership with higher ed institutions, could think more innovatively about trying to help those teachers fast-track to get trained and then be placed into classrooms,” she said.

A report published in March by the RAND Corporation found that nearly half of all Black teachers said they at the end of last school year — threatening to further widen diversity gaps in school staffing. Currently, about 4 in 5 educators nationwide are white, compared to less than half of all public school students.  Though this year’s data on teacher turnover are not yet available, the RAND finding underscores the need for schools to consider tactics, such as those suggested by Brownie, to diversify their teaching force. 

When schools are short on staff, it’s the families and teachers who feel the effects, said Annette Anderson, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Safe and Healthy Schools.

The K-12 expert is also a mother of three students in the Baltimore City Public School system and, recently, around the dinner table, her eighth-grade daughter reported that her sixth-grade cousin had been in her class that day. The youngsters’ cohorts had been merged due to lack of staff.

“That’s a concern for me, because that means my daughter is not getting the level of instruction that she should in her classroom,” the Baltimore mother told ����Ӱ��.

“It’s not the teacher’s fault that took off,” Anderson continued. She empathizes as a former classroom teacher and principal. “It’s not the fault of the administrator, who’s trying to figure it out in the zero hour.”

“That’s a process and a policy issue,” she said.

Seattle Public Schools announced that its 52,000 students would have due to large shares of staff making Veterans Day into a four-day weekend. And in Montgomery County, Maryland, the Board of Education voted this week to make a scheduled half-day before Thanksgiving a vacation day for the district’s 165,000 students because there are to fill in for the large number of educators taking time off before the break.

In an even more extreme case, in West Michigan made a last-minute call to shutter their doors from Nov. 9 to Nov. 15 due to high shares of staff out for COVID-19, other illnesses or for personal reasons, the district announced Monday.

“We are unable to sufficiently staff our buildings to meet the needs of our students. Sub shortages are not unique to NPS, and this is a challenge we, as well as many other districts are facing,” the district wrote in a Nov. 9 unsigned to families.

In Seattle, requested substitute teachers for the day after Veterans Day, the district said.

“We are aware of a larger than normal number of [Seattle Public School] staff taking leave on Friday, and do not believe we have adequate personnel to open schools,” the district explained in an email sent to parents on Tuesday, just three days before the shutdown. 

In Montgomery County, the sudden change to the Thanksgiving holiday prompted outrage from some parents.

“To give families 13 days of notice … have you no consideration for parents in health care, parents who are essential workers, parents who basically count on the school schedule that you publish?” parent Dr. Jennifer Reesman told . “You basically told us all that you don’t care about us.”

The closures further compound the disruptions that schools have weathered over the past 20 months of the pandemic — exacerbating academic, social and emotional challenges for many students.

“Now is the time to double down and hopefully get students even more access to even more great instruction, not less,” Tequilla Brownie, executive vice president of The New Teacher Project, told ����Ӱ��.

With dwindling substitute teacher reserves in many school systems nationwide, Daniel Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association, said there’s little district leaders can do when educators request leave around the holidays.

“These are days that teachers can take,” he told ����Ӱ��, explaining that the right to use paid time off, known as PTO, is stipulated in many educator contracts. “Ordinarily, school districts would rely on substitutes to cover for teachers. The problem is, you can’t find substitutes.”

Closures are “not what superintendents want,” the AASA leader continued. “They want to get the kids back to school … They’re doing everything that they can with the resources that they have to mitigate the situation.” 

The pandemic, however, has shown that school systems can get creative, Brownie pointed out. Some districts tapped central office staff to help out with remote learning. She wonders whether it could have been possible to replicate those solutions to avoid school closures this time around.

“The most dismal option is to shutter the doors,” said the education equity expert.

In Montgomery County, the scheduling change comes on the heels of weeks of educator frustration and burnout. Two weeks ago, teachers held a to protest staffing shortages that, they said, were exhausting and stressing out employees. Signs taped in vehicle windows lamented “skeleton crews” and educators “drowning” in their workload, The Washington Post reported.

During a press conference Tuesday, union President Jennifer Martin warned of a “great resignation” in Maryland’s largest district if Montgomery County does not improve conditions for its teachers. The school system currently has , including 161 teaching positions, according to local reporting.

“We hope you are able to take some time to rest and recharge during the extended Thanksgiving Break,” said a Nov. 9 to families and teachers signed Montgomery County Public Schools.

Many school systems across the country have tried to preempt such situations by scheduling extra time for staff and students to recharge. Over a dozen districts — including and — recently announced days off or shortened schedules to fight burnout and provide mental health breaks for educators, according to a recent from Burbio, a data service that has tracked school calendars through the pandemic. 

District announcements generally did not mention substitute teacher shortages, though it’s possible the desire to avoid needing more coverage for teachers than they could supply also played into the calculus for some school administrators.

Policy varies on whether the days off will have to be made up later in the school year. Most states require that schools be in session 180 days a year. A local that Montgomery County’s 2021-22 school calendar had 182 days built in so the additional day off would not affect it. The Newaygo Public Schools used up five of its snow days in the current closure, .

The disruptions, planned and unplanned, are yet another byproduct of the pandemic, said Domenech. He’s hopeful that newly authorized vaccines for younger children will help make the situation more normal by the spring. 

But in the meantime, he acknowledged that the scheduling changes may frustrate many families.

“Working parents very much are dependent on [having their children in school],” he said.

While the spread of COVID within child care programs remains quite low (a large state like North Carolina is only 24 outbreaks among its thousands of open programs), the of the virus means inevitable staff exposures. For child care, the impacts of even a few quarantined educators can be devastating.

While public schools are dealing with their own significant staffing problems, child care programs are even more fragile. Programs tend to be on the small side — most centers serve less than 100 children, and family child care providers less than 10 — and they operate with . This means their staff numbers are lean, and staff are often playing multiple essential roles from food prep to checking in children. Moreover, child cares are required to adhere to strict legal adult-to-child ratios, and going ‘out of ratio’ is a major no-no. Lindsey Noblot, a project director at SouthSide focused on policy, said although their absolute number of quarantined staff was low, “You take a few people out of that equation and it’s like, ‘this isn’t going to work.’”

Noblot added that SouthSide is actually in a better position to weather the pandemic storm than many programs in the region because they have a large number of federally-funded Head Start and Early Head Start classrooms. She said that on a group chat of local programs, “It’s horrible. Every day there’s someone on there that’s like ‘I need somebody to help support as a cook, secretary work, classroom support.’ It’s just nonstop.” Rixa Evershed, an administrator at a child care center in Washington State, concurs. “Of all the challenges we have right now, [staffing] is overwhelmingly the biggest one.”

A dire lack of substitutes compounds the problem. Substitute child care staff have been scarce for years. In the current moment, potential staff are being sucked up by public schools, private ‘pods,’ and virtual learning support centers — to say nothing of employers like Amazon and Target that tend to pay better and offer superior benefits. In response to Vermont providing funding for virtual learning support centers, one child care owner in August, “We were struggling before to find substitutes if people were out sick. Now there’s pretty much no chance we’re ever going to get a substitute.”

The makeup of the early care and education workforce plays a role as well. According to from the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, 42% of center teachers have a child under 13 years old, and a quarter have a child under the age of five. Many child care teachers and would-be teachers, then, have to contend with the chaos of virtual school and securing their own child care despite limited means. These demographic realities are having a real impact: of 176 Massachusetts child care workers performed by the nonprofit Neighborhood Villages, an inability to secure consistent child care was the second-most cited reason for not returning to work when their programs reopened, behind only fear of COVID health risks.

With increasing quarantines and few substitutes, programs have nothing but bad options when it comes to absent staff: they can shuffle children and staff around, press administrators into service as teachers or close classrooms. In some cases, they are forced to compromise on best practice safety precautions. A September of child care providers in Ireland (which has a similar system to the U.S.) reported that 61 percent “said they were experiencing problems complying with measures including play pods, social distancing and appropriate adult to child ratios,” primarily due to staffing struggles. Noblot said she has heard of programs in her region wrestling with similarly fraught decisions.

All of these disruptions, of course, have a cascading set of negative impacts on the families who rely on child care programs in order to work. Given racial and socioeconomic disparities in, it is disproportionately lower-income families of color who absorb the blows. Evershed, whose program predominantly serves these types of families, recalled desperation and anger from parents when she recently had no choice but to close a classroom for three days due to a lack of available staff.

Every new round of jobs data that parents are being pushed out of the labor force at stunning rates, underscoring the role of child care in the nation’s economic recovery. As the Boston Globe, “If child-care seats permanently disappear, the burden of caring for young children will likely fall — as it has already during the pandemic — predominantly on women, said Tania Del Rio, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement in Boston. Nationwide, about 865,000 women dropped out of the workforce between August and September, according to a National Women’s Law Center analysis. That included about 324,000 Latinas and 58,000 Black women.”

There are also developmental implications for children. Young children thrive on consistency, routine and relationships. Past research that having multiple transitions between caregivers can lead to negative outcomes such as behavioral problems. Evershed sees this playing out in her program. “Children are not getting any kind of quality experiences right now, because on any given day we have to move their classroom,” she said, explaining that the administration has to go through the process of “’We need to put these five children into this classroom with this teacher so we can make the numbers work, and so we can keep the doors open.’ And you can tell by how children are acting — there’s no sense of consistency, no relationships being developed.”

All of these wounds circle the central fact that staffing shortages pose an existential threat to child care programs. Jenna Conway, Virginia’s Chief School Readiness Officer, said in an interview that “if you don’t have full classrooms, making the economics work is very difficult.” This is both the case when programs have to temporarily close classrooms or entire buildings due to shortages, and because with limited staff, programs can only take in a certain percentage of their enrollment capacity. Conway noted that even programs which aren’t dealing with quarantined staff are struggling to hire or retain enough teachers to regain their full capacity. Since most programs rely on paying clients — and especially since programs’ expenses during the pandemic — serving fewer children leads to a bleeding budget.

Each leader interviewed for this story agreed that in addition to getting the pandemic under control, staffing shortages won’t clear up without significant federal financial support. Child care wages are simply too low and benefits too thin; the sector is becoming increasingly noncompetitive as a place of employment. While there are policy roadblocks that can be smoothed over — for instance, some states do not allow portability of background checks, so a potential substitute needs separate ones from all programs she might work at — the conversation starts and ends with compensation. For floundering programs, staffing help can’t come fast enough. As Noblot put it, “Child care providers are so overworked, and there’s no voice for them.”