School District Offered A Woman A Full-Time Teaching Job After She Applied To Be A Substitute Despite Not Being Licensed
Who’s actually teaching your kids at school?
Drazen Zigic | Shutterstock After her own kids started school in Virginia, a mom decided to apply to be a substitute teacher at her local school district — but the vice principal’s response was not what she expected.
In a post to the “Teachers” forum on Reddit, she revealed she was offered a full-time teaching position for a 5th-grade classroom without any experience or teaching credentials. “This is insane,” she wrote. “I’m not a licensed teacher! I don’t have a teaching degree.”
Despite being unlicensed, the woman was offered a teaching position by a school district after applying to be a substitute.
Similar to most areas in the United States, Virginia has struggled with a teaching shortage. The state boasts over 9,000 vacant teaching positions across the state. To the dismay of many concerned parents and educational advocates, districts have turned to “loopholes” for hiring teachers, including programs that hire unlicensed and inexperienced professionals to teach their children.
“When you are bringing in underprepared teachers, that’s a recipe for achievement gaps,” Learning Policy Institute researcher Emma Garcia explained to Axios. “That’s a short-term fix.” Not only is it a “band-aid” solution to teaching shortages, but it also places student education at risk.
“I applied to be a substitute teacher with my local county since my kids are starting school,” the Reddit woman wrote in her post. “I got a call from the vice principal offering me a position as a 5th-grade teacher.”
Despite having a Bachelor’s degree and a little experience working in kindergarten classrooms, she does not have a license to teach. She doesn’t have any relevant experience teaching middle school children.
“This school must be very desperate for the VP to call and offer me this,” she wrote. “Remind me why this is crazy.”
With teacher shortages across the country, many districts are being forced to sacrifice quality for quantity.
Many districts are struggling to staff their classrooms in the face of massive teacher shortages.
With rising rates of burnout, low wages, and difficult workplace conditions, it’s no surprise that teachers are leaving (and even being celebrated) in leaving their jobs. But who is going to take their place — especially if nothing is changing on an institutional level?
Not only are teachers leaving jobs where they are overworked and underpaid, but they’re also choosing to leave a toxic educational system. One that often prioritizes profits over students, teachers, and educational staff.
With a lack of funding and poor infrastructure, they’re not able to fairly compensate experienced teachers and instead have to turn to inexperienced candidates to teach their kids — a phenomenon that many are calling equally “unfair and unethical.”
People Images Yuri A / Shutterstock.com
“The teacher shortage is real, large and growing, and worse than we thought,” a team of Learning Policy Institute researchers explained. “A shortage of teachers harms students, teachers, and the public education system as a whole. Lack of sufficient, qualified teachers and staff instability threaten students’ ability to learn and reduce teachers’ effectiveness, and high teacher turnover consumes economic resources that could be better deployed elsewhere.”
While these unusual hiring practices might open up job opportunities, they harm students, low-income communities, and experienced teachers.
Especially for low-income communities that have struggled with “staff poaching” from wealthier neighboring districts, losing just a few teachers, let alone the majority of them, has severe impacts on students’ education and well-being.
“[These] are the school I taught in at the beginning of my career, so I know it, I saw it firsthand,” tenured teacher and president of the National Education Association Becky Pringle told PBS. “The schools that have been underserved for decades.”
“This is not new. This is chronic, it’s systemic,” she added. “It absolutely is tied to the systemic racism and economic inequalities and injustices that are in every social system.”
So, while it might be alarming for many community members and parents to see Reddit posts and stories like this one, it’s the unfortunate “band-aid” response school districts are forced to make to have “teachers” in the classroom.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a News & Entertainment Writer at YourTango who focuses on health & wellness, social policy, and human interest stories.