Substitute teachers at Guilderland schools have seen less money in their pockets from the district, but it remains unclear if the district has realized any savings.
Guilderland Superintendent of Schools Marie Wiles presented an update on substitute teaching expenses at the Board of Education’s meeting Tuesday, Dec. 10. The board adopted reduced teacher substitute rates for the 2013-14 school year in July, which was a daily rate of $5 less than the prior school year. Four board members voted to rescind the reduced rates a month after it was adopted, but five members voted to keep it.
This reduced the daily rates to $90 for elementary and middle school substitute teachers, $60 for half-day substitutes at the high school and $95 for full-day high school substitutes. The long-term substitute rate, requiring 15 consecutive days substituting for the same teacher retroactive to the first day, was reduced to $165 per day.
Wiles said concrete conclusions could not yet be drawn on the affects of reducing the rate.
“The bottom line in this discussion is it’s really too soon to tell whether the change in the substitute rate will create a substantial savings in substitute costs for this year,” Wiles said. “If we look at the total amount of costs that we have had since September we are actually up in our costs, but that is attributable to a number of variables.”
Wiles said there have been more long-term substitutes this school year, which is one factor for the increased expenses.
Wiles said the fill-rate — or rather, the failure to hire a daily substitute — last school year had 17 instances where a substitute could not be attained. This school year, the fill-rate more than doubled to 42 instances. Wiles said at this point she could not link the change in pay-rate to the higher occurrences.
“We really need to track the data on costs through a longer period of time before we know what the financial impact is on changing our rate,” Wiles said. “Our building principals have felt the impact of managing unfilled positions and will continue to do so. If the question is simply financial at this point, I would say the jury is out.”
The number of new substitutes requesting to be included to the district call list also declined, but Wiles did not specify how much it declined.
When the district does not fill a substitute position, there are a variety of different outcomes, Wiles said. A teaching assistant assigned to a different role could be reassigned. Several classroom teachers, mostly at the high school, could fill small increments of time to cover all the absent teacher’s classes. Sometimes services will be canceled, or programs are doubled up.
“There are a variety of ways we scramble, frankly, to make sure that our students are supervised when we don’t have the regular classroom teacher,” Wiles said.
Board member Gloria Towle-Hilt said she was concerned over principals sharing instances where a substitute would be lined up, but then before school the substitute would call and cancel saying they got a “better offer.”
“That really concerns me,” Towle-Hilt said. Wiles confirmed this has happened.
Other board members also questioned whether any savings that might be achieved would be worth the cost educationally.