…man, it’s a sad state of affairs

Done with my first week of what is my fifth or so year subbing. Will obviously continue, but you know, at some point, if you’re actually willing to become a full-time educator, and you get zero interviews the entire summer, for the second year in a row, you get suspicious.

And in my case, I have confirmed a lot of suspicions about how my district is simply refusing to hire or move people up. They’ll move teachers and administrators around from school to school, and I guess FT teachers willing to teach at different schools also are more desired than those who aren’t. But STILL there’s lots of issues.

Empty rooms: hoo boy empty rooms. I’m not talking about rooms reserved for small group testing, calm down/timeout rooms, etc. I mean VACANT rooms. No teachers or staff in those rooms and these rooms are labeled as “classroom” too. They could have hired more teachers here, but chose not to, or someone dipped, either way, now we have crowded classrooms and more potential teacher burnout since they don’t fill that empty room. If you have hallway duty or subbing security/hall monitor or have to move from room to room, you’ll likely see one room that is vacant and unused and it just makes you question.

And then I get confirmation from teacher assistants that even they don’t move up. One woman told me she’s been a teacher assistant for like eight years but can’t seem to get higher despite her degree. It’s confirming that even though we are liked by upper admin, and school admin, they want us to KEEP in the positions we are in, and never get to move on because we are “effective” as subs and assistants. We can handle bigger and the admins aren’t letting us!

Heck, even the kids are catching on. As a familiar sub to MANY schools, kids ask me why I can’t become a full-time teacher. My answer remains the same to this day, the upper admin just prevents me from doing so, no matter how much I modify my resume and application.

Also the fact that as I am typing this I find out my school district is hoping to make ChatGPT for Teachers the norm for lesson plans. Just what we all needed, eh? It continues to gradually get worse and everyone EXCEPT the main district admin and HR ought to be sounding the alarm.