The principal at Oakland Tech referred questions about staffing shortages to the district, which acknowledged the lack of substitutes district-wide, adding that it's common for some staff-juggling to take place when a sub can’t be found. “Like, it's kind of, like, ‘Fend for yourself because I have too much work and I can't deal with you.’” “They’re just kind of like, I don't know, like, figure it out,” she said. Wallace called the staff "overwhelmed" at a time when they are supposed to be helping her plan her way into college. “But they never really get back to you, or you email them and they don't respond.” “You don't go to their office anymore, you fill out a Google Form,” she said. Oakland Tech junior Georgia Wallace, outside her home in Oakland in 2021, says staffing issues have made it hard to get help from counselors this year. “If you don’t have a teacher there for an important subject and you're just forced to do busywork, you lose focus, you lose energy, you lose motivation,” Zamil said.Īdministrators and other support staff in Bay Area school districts being called away from their regular responsibilities to step into classrooms creates its own kind of staffing shortage.Īt Oakland Technical High School, junior Georgia Wallace said it has been nearly impossible to connect with her counselors. Zamil thinks the frequent disruption to classroom teaching is especially harmful for freshmen and sophomores, who may be less engaged in school compared with seniors bent on graduating. “We didn’t learn anything in those three weeks.” “That teacher does not teach the subject, does not have any training in that subject and it just keeps spiraling and spiraling,” she said. Zamil says when her anatomy teacher was out sick for three weeks, a rotation of teachers had to fill in. That’s down to 58% in 2021.īerkeley High has been getting creative. In 2018, Berkeley Unified overall was able to fill 69% of sub requests from the sub pool. “We may have 12 teachers unfilled, and I have to fill those positions,” Ferguson said, “A lot of people afraid that, you know, come to work with this COVID going on, so it's putting yourself at risk, really.
Each school day morning, she arrives and runs the staff report, which tells her who will be out for the day. She says the staffing shortages are across all grades. The person charged with finding replacements for teachers who are out at Berkeley High is school secretary Marie Ferguson. The situation has become so dire that the district has had to send teachers normally on special assignment for math or literacy coaching to work both as substitutes at the high school, and to replace administrators who typically would be on hall duty but are themselves subbing in classrooms. “We are also short of safety staff, so the hallways are unmonitored and students are roaming the halls, banging on classroom doors, vandalizing, etcetera,” said Moran. Zamil said she had teachers out in her anatomy, AP government and AP literature classes just that week.Įthnic studies teacher Dana Moran agrees with students that there has been much more fighting and unruly behavior this year. There are fights every single day, and then you combine that with teacher shortages, and safety officers aren't coming as often and you get chaos.” The fire alarm is pulled like once a week. “And so I would describe a lot of the behavior we're seeing as middle school behavior. “Half of the school's population, the sophomores and the freshmen, have not been in school since middle school,” she said. Standing outside the high school on a warm fall afternoon, senior Neva Zamil spoke with frustration about how she sees the sub shortage adding to the mayhem. He says he's gotten used to weekly fights and fire alarms being pulled. “But she wasn’t here, so we waited 15 minutes and then we just left and wandered around school.” Berkeley High sophomore Sascha Amendola at his house on March 19, 2021.
“Just today, we don’t know what happened to our math teacher,” Berkeley High ninth grader Sascha Amendola replied when texted last week.
But sub numbers have dwindled across the Bay Area, and the shortage appears to be at a crisis point at Berkeley High School, where students are walking out of empty classrooms. And when the teachers on staff miss work, it’s crucial to have a sufficient number of substitute teachers available. Many school districts have had trouble filling teacher vacancies.