Clallam County public school districts are struggling to hire enough workers as they prepare for students to return for the new school year, and local superintendents are hoping community members will step up.
The Port Angeles School District has said it is “urgently hiring,” paraeducators, emergency substitute teachers, substitute bus drivers, maintenance staff and secretaries. The district currently has more than 30 openings for paraeducators and substitutes, according to district spokesperson Carmen Geyer.
“Just like the rest of the country, we are experiencing a shortage of substitutes,” Geyer said in an interview Thursday.
In Port Angeles, Geyer said in addition to workforce disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, the school district had nine paraeducators recently retire, and other educators have remained in the workforce but changed positions. Some workers have also moved up in the workforce, Geyer said, with some substitute teachers becoming paraeducators and some paraeducators becoming teachers.
“We are having to get creative,” Geyer said. During staff shortages the previous school year, “we did have administrators filling classrooms so we didn’t have to cancel school or classes.”
Paraeducators are generally part-time support staff that work in the classroom, assisting teachers with instruction and clerical duties. They’re required to have certain credentials, but starting in the 2019-2020 school year, the State of Washington added additional requirements such as test scores, higher education degrees or a certain amount of higher education hours.
Part of the issue facing school districts is that some of the positions are part-time and don’t qualify workers for health care or retirement benefits, said Superintendent David Bingham of the Crescent School District in Joyce, and bus drivers are generally a split shift, mornings and afternoons.
Bingham said in the past he’s bundled multiple part-time positions together to create a full-time position.
“I have bus drivers who do custodial work, who work in classrooms,” Bingham said Friday. “We say ‘I’ve got a three-hour custodial position, would you have interest in working in a classroom?’”
But classroom positions require credentials that bus drivers or custodial staff don’t always have, Bingham said.
Geyer said the Port Angeles district is offering pathways to help workers get those credentials, such as applying for emergency certification and payment for the fingerprints and background checks required to work in the classroom.
The Sequim School District also is offering to apply for emergency substitute certificates, according to spokesperson Megan Lyke.
Full-time positions might pull in applicants from outside the region, Bingham said, but the majority of the paraeducator positions in his district were community members, often with children in the schools.
Districts have mostly been able to find enough full-time credentialed teachers, but several of the county’s superintendents noted the applicant pool for those jobs was significantly lower than before the COVID-19 pandemic lockdownm crating a demand for substitute teachers.
“Cape Flattery has experienced many openings in regard to our certified teaching staff,” said Superintendent Michelle Parkin of the Cape Flattery School District, which includes schools in Clallam Bay and Neah Bay.
“We have had to pull all of our resources to make sure all of our school campuses would be able to open safely,” Parkin said Friday.
“If there’s anybody interested in being a substitute, recruitment efforts are still in full swing.”
Superintendent Diana Reaume of the Quillayute Valley School District in Forks said the district had done well at retaining teachers during the pandemic but this year many workers have left the area, and the lack of affordable housing made it difficult to recruit new teachers.
Reaume also suggested that the pandemic and the politicization of education nationally has turned people away from education as a profession, and that wages for a paraeducator were comparable to jobs such as fast food workers that don’t require credentials.
“Education has become so politicized that you’re hesitant to say one thing or another,” Reaume said. “You have to be here to serve every student, the political pull is challenging and it’s in the face of our schools.”
According to QVSD’s website, starting pay for a paraeducator is $16.87 an hour, and according to Indeed.com, average hourly wages at McDonald’s restaurants in Washington were $15.58 an hour. The state minimum wage is $14.49 an hour.
Reaume said teachers and school staff were now having to deal with additional responsibilities as some students return from remote learning, dealing with behavioral issues and getting students back into school routines.
“There’s not an on-and-off switch,” Reaume said. “You just don’t go back to normal that easy.”
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Reporter Peter Segall can be reached at psegall@soundpublishing.com.
