The New Westminster school district is working to increase its pool of teachers-on-call – and to find them enough work locally so they don’t have to cross district boundaries.
At the Sept. 29 school board meeting, held virtually via Webex, trustee Dee Beattie raised the question of whether the district is anticipating teacher-on-call shortages this year in the face of COVID-19.
Robert Weston, the district’s director of human resources, told trustees the teacher-on-call situation has been challenging for the district so far this year. He said the district has had a harder time finding teachers-on-call, adding it appears that a number of substitute teachers have chosen not to work for at least the first couple of months of the school year.
The district is currently interviewing and hiring with the aim of increasing its teacher-on-call pool to between 30 and 35 active teachers. From there, priority work would be given to a select group of those teachers.
Trustee Maya Russell raised the concern about the possibility of teachers-on-call working in other districts and thus increasing the potential for COVID-19 exposures across district and school lines. She noted the parallel to long-term-care homes, where workers have been restricted to working at one site in order to prevent the spread of the virus.
Weston said the district’s goal in hiring more teachers-on-call is to create small groups of teachers that can be given consistent, regular work within the district – keeping them to no more than three schools, and preferably only one or two.
Whether the cost of teachers-on-call will increase in light of the pandemic is also an active question in the district.
The issue of substitute teaching costs has been on the mind of trustees since the district set out its 2020/21 budget in the spring, calling for a shade over $2 million to be spent on substitute salaries.
At the time, trustees raised the concern that those costs could be higher in 2020/21 because of the pandemic. Secretary-treasurer Bettina Ketcham told trustees at the time that the district will continue to watch the issue and that it can be brought back to the table when the board revisits the budget this November.
