One of my friends is a supervisor in your industry and she is having a lot of conversations with her direct reports. I’m absolutely blown away by her keeping a cool head because COVID completely fucked her family over and she’s dealing with trying to manage deteriorating mental health of a family member on a different continent, while waiting for WA to open up so she can travel or get relative here (she’s put in half a dozen applications so far to have them allowed here)
But the person who was surprised the government makes laws is unsurprising to me.
I think generally here people don’t expect kids to learn when they have a substitute. IME they’re literally just considered babysitters for the class. If there is a lesson plan, then they might try to teach but often they just sit there with a book and keep the kids from fighting.
And your biggest sub pool is usually retired teachers who already have all that info in the system, but guess what retired teachers do not want to do right now?? Yes, indeed.
I think that is ridiculous. I always assumed that these kinds of requirements were because they had a lot of people wanting to do the work. Maybe they used to have their pick of the litter, but they need to be a little more agile and change with the times. It’s not like subbing is ever fun. Kids were vicious to the subs when I was in school.
Ha, very much that vibe with our federation of states right now, where one has decided to open it’s international borders and not require quarantine whilst other states currently require interstate travellers from that state to quarantine for two weeks and get travel exemptions/permits.
I think they mainly come down to liability- the need to do a lot of due diligence on potential subs to make sure they aren’t folks that should not be around children. It used to be in Portland that there were no permanent teacher jobs and most new licensed teachers were subs for years before a contract spot opened up
I’ve subbed, as a licensed teacher, for anything from $75-$110 per day.
Some states require a sub license (in Ohio they analyzed my college transcript…and licensed me as a social studies sub, despite being a certified math/science teacher…and having gone to college for that- I was truly baffled. But oddly, with a SS license I was allowed to sub anything, so whatever), others just require a certain number of college hours (I started subbing in Texas my junior year of college. Pay was the same as when I was a licensed teacher.)
You get paid more if you are a long-term sub (like for a teacher’s maternity leave), but not much.
I’d never sub right now. Kids aren’t masked and aren’t vaccinated. No way.
If there is a shortage, why would they not pay the people doing it short term? Why can’t your neighbor become a PAID bus driver?
I noticed our college football stadium is looking for volunteers on game days- because they can’t find staff.
I don’t understand this- if you can’t find people who will do the job for pay, why do you think you can find people who will do it for free?
Because people who need pay usually need a certain amount of money in order to survive, while volunteers may have no need for any additional income at all due to being independent wealthy or something. This happens in the writing and publishing field a lot and is why verticals like personal essay, food, fashion, lifestyle, and travel writing pay so poorly compared to tech, business, or finance writing. The only reason I switched from food and fashion to tech and finance was because I kept butting up against this. There are loads of rich people who fancy themselves writers and write for free or for way below what market value would be if they weren’t in the field. Increasingly, in those high desirability verticals, you find non-paying submission calls while in other fields you do not. It’s not unusual for high desirability articles to pay nothing (or like $30), even at major publications, while tech articles at the same publication pay hundreds of dollars each.
No free ticket. I mean, you get in the stadium, but you don’t get to see the game.
It just seems like they would offer pay for the shifts, even if it’s just a temporary term. So it’s not a ‘job’, but the person is compensated.
Regularly driving a school bus isn’t quite the same as reading in the classroom or other typical parent volunteers. (And schools rely A LOT of parent volunteers to run.)
My impression was that driving a school bus required a CDL, and that also cuts down on the pool of eligible drivers, and also puts a burden on the drivers (because you have to take a class, which costs money, and get the additional endorsement on your license, which costs money, and it isn’t an instantaneous process either).
I can imagine for at least some organizations, adding people to payroll, especially on such an ad hoc and temporary basis, also has a burden (in this case an administrative burden).
Asking for volunteers but not offering any perks is not likely to work very well though. My father works at a golf course very part time. He doesn’t do it for the pay (which is peanuts). He does it because he gets free golfing. The course is actually always hurting for employees, so most of the workers are retirees who work for that perk, and not a salary. Nearly none of them would do it without the perk (it just is not worth it to work for essentially minimum wage) and the course would be severely understaffed (well, I mean, they could pay people more, but lol, they won’t; also, uh, there’s a pretty big drug abuse problem in the region, and anyone likely to take such a low paying job might have a drug abuse issue as well, which they don’t want and wouldn’t help them staff the place with non-retirees (apparently the factories in the area have this problem as well (people constantly failing drug tests required for employment)).
I wouldn’t volunteer at a stadium unless I could get comped tickets to other games (work a shift, get a ticket or something). Lots of places that use volunteers use this model (botanical gardens, parks, museums, arts institutions…).
Anyway, if they really wanted to attract “workers” who might actually be more like volunteers, the have to think outside the box and offer some perk, or people won’t do it, it isn’t worth it.
This might be an oregon specific thing, but in certain professions you can do it without a professional license as long as you’re not getting paid, and as long as you’re volunteering for a government agency or nonprofit. So for example, we require alcohol servers to have OLCC licenses in Oregon. But if they’re serving for a nonprofit and no compensation is being exchanged, they just read a little form about not serving drunk people/under 21 people and sign it.
So I wonder if some of the volunteering (like for school bus drivers) is expediting training/licensing requirements. I.e. they may be able to take a short course rather than a full CDL?
The CDL are a mess in my state at least, because they were backed up in testing during the pandemic. Part of the driver crunch is a crunch at the Oregon DMV to issue CDLs and run tests.
Added: But also in many government union workplaces, a volunteer is not allowed to replace the work of a paid staffer. Like when I was in AmeriCorps, I could not do the same work as a paid staffer in the schools, I had to have my own job description that did not have duties overlap.
You guys made me look. In my state a substitute teacher has to have just a GED, and pay is $62 a day with a GED, up to $78 a day for certified teachers (long-term subs make a little more). There’s a four-hour training class and a criminal background check (that costs the applicant $54). Also it looks like minimum age is 22.
Damn I had this thought that there could be an excellent TV show plot, whereby a sixteen year old hates high school so they get their GED and then go back as a sub.
I mean School of Rock has Jack Black becoming a sub when it was supposed to be his room mate getting the sub job, fake ID isn’t that much of a stretch.
