SPS meeting substitute shortfall

Nebraska’s rural school districts are struggling to find substitute teachers.

Sidney Public Schools faces the same challenge, Jay Ehler, SPS superintendent, said.

“We have had struggles in the past having enough substitute teachers,” Ehler said. “We’re doing a little better this year. There’s a few more people available to sub, and are coming in and filling out applications.”

Not having enough substitute teachers means administrators have to step away from their duties to cover classes, Ehler said.

“Sometimes students get farmed out into other classes, so if you have a class of 20 kids and there’s five sections of second grade, five of those might go to the other classes,” he said. “It increases the number of students in the class.”

He added, “Our teachers do a great job of figuring it out and making it work, but it definitely is a challenge that day.”

The shortage was felt most in the spring, Ehler said.

“Come about April, you have a lot of student activities going on where students are out of town, and teachers are coaches or sponsors, or doing something,” he said. “We had people who had ran out of days. They couldn’t sub anymore.”

The substitute teacher pool has increased this year. Ehler attributes this to the city’s current economic climate.

“Our unemployment rates are really low, so people in Sidney have always typically had jobs. There wasn’t as many of those people out there who wanted to come and sub or needed the part-time money,” he said. “With the recent changes in Sidney there is a little larger pool of people that are looking for part-time work or just work in general.”

To address the shortage, an ESU-13 superintendents advisory group this year assembled a proposal to change state requirements for substitutes.

“The superintendents there put together a letter on some changes we think could happen,” Ehler said. “Sen. (Steve) Erdman prioritized that as one of his bills and took that to the legislature and they discussed it.”

Nebraska Department of Education changed its requirements for substitute teachers this year to allow more people to qualify and also increased the number of days a local substitute can work in a school district from 45 to 90 days.

“If we have a good substitute we like to use a lot we can now use them for essentially half of the days of school in a year,” Ehler said.

Ehler is optimistic the the district’s substitute shortage is being resolved.

“We are doing a little better,” he said, “and I think it’s a combination of the requirements changing a little bit so more people can qualify and then just the local climate in Sidney.”