What The Hell America!

This story was originally published by EdSurge.

It’s that time of year when seemingly everyone has the sniffles, and many people are laid up with a cold, the flu or some other unsavory affliction.

While staff absences are rarely seamless in any setting, in K-12 schools, there is at least a system designed to support such occurrences. Public school districts have a reserve of substitute teachers they can tap into when sickness spreads and staff begin to call out.

In early care and education, on the other hand, there is no such infrastructure. And that reality affects program operations year-round, not just during cold and flu season.

As teacher shortages have become more severe in early learning settings since the pandemic, previous workarounds to staffing holes have become less reliable. Programs, for the most part, just don’t have the kind of personnel buffer they once did, and as a result, there is little margin for error if someone becomes ill or injured, let alone wants to take a vacation.

Most professionals have access to sick leave and other paid time off; they are also, importantly, empowered to take that leave when they need it. Not so in early care and education, notes Lauren Hogan, strategic adviser at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of early childhood teachers and staff.

“We don’t afford that kind of support to educators who, frankly, spend all of their time with tiny germ factories who are constantly getting themselves and everybody else sick,” Hogan says.

“It’s physically, emotionally and psychologically demanding work, and we provide no respite, from a system or policy level, for this,” she adds. Early childhood educators “come up with what they can just to see another day.”

Scrambling without subs

In the absence of a better backup plan when staff miss work, many early learning programs are forced to be “savvy and scrappy” about their solutions, says Jason Moss, head of new government initiatives at Wonderschool, a provider of child care solutions that has been operating a substitute teaching pool in Mississippi for over a year now.

“It is a scramble,” he says, “and it’s a painful one.”

Numerous early childhood educators and providers have personal stories that give color to this dynamic.

Kelly Dawn Jones, a home-based child care provider in Indiana, recalls that when she became pregnant with her first child and began looking for someone to help run her program while she was away, she was given two options: Close her program’s doors for the time being, or hire someone to replace her. Neither was financially feasible for Jones, who barely earned enough money from the business to pay herself.

Nancy Sylvester, executive director of a center-based early childhood program in Jackson, Mississippi, has had the center’s board members, fellow church congregants and her own relatives, including her husband and adult son, get fingerprinted and undergo background checks so they would be able to fill in for absent staff when she was in a bind.

“It’s so sad,” Sylvester says. “You come down to a point where you just need a warm body to make sure children are safe.”

Nicole Lazarte, now the policy and advocacy communications specialist at NAEYC, was recently working as an infant teacher at an early childhood center in northern Virginia. She says that, during her time as a classroom teacher there, she underwent surgery and returned to work within a few days, not wanting to leave her colleagues in the lurch.

“You don’t even expect someone to fill in,” she says. Every day she didn’t show up, she knew she was asking already-overstretched staff to take on more than they could handle.

Before the pandemic, Lazarte says, her program had 10 to 15 teachers on staff who were “floaters,” meaning they moved between infant, toddler and preschool classrooms as needed to help maintain adult-to-child ratios required by state licensing regulations. These teachers also insulated the program from the disruption of staff absences. If someone in a preschool classroom had to miss a day of work, a floater could fill in for them in that classroom all day.

Since the pandemic, though, and the staffing shortage that has plagued the field ever since, those floaters were hired to fill classroom teacher vacancies. And there weren’t enough people interested in jobs in early childhood to replace the floaters.

“That’s why we’re seeing the [staffing] shortage. That’s why we’re seeing such a high level of burnout,” she notes. Eventually, “you have to leave for your own personal well-being. Not because you want to, but because your body is taking a toll. Your mental health is taking a toll.”

All three women mentioned the “warm body” problem. Without qualified, trained teachers to step in and work with the children, many programs will reach for any adult who has passed a background check, just so they can maintain ratios and keep the classrooms open.

“I don’t want to hire a warm body,” says Jones in Indiana. “I want someone who’s going to talk with [the kids], interact with them, joke with them, build relationships with them.”

That sentiment is shared by nearly everyone in the field, which is why many educators find themselves showing up to work even on days they probably should have stayed home.

“It connects to the overall disrespect we see for early childhood educators,” notes Hogan of NAEYC. “Like yeah, a warm body is all a child really needs so their parents can go to work.”

Solving the sub problem

Of all the intractable challenges facing the early care and education field, this is not one.

“I think it’s solvable,” says Erica Phillips, executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care (NAFCC). “I do.”

But the question is not just about creating a pool of substitute teachers the way K-12 school districts do, she adds. The real challenge is finding and vetting teachers to fill that pool.

In an environment where full-time early childhood teachers are already a scarce resource, it would be equally or more difficult to find people with adequate training and experience to take one-off teaching shifts with inconsistent pay, she says.

Still, some efforts are underway.

A number of sub pools have emerged from providers banding together to try to solve the problem for themselves. Phillips knows of sub pools in Arkansas and Indiana where that’s the case.

In rural New Hampshire and Vermont, a new career development program for early childhood educators in the region is trying to solve the twin demands for short-term subs and long-term teachers at once.

The region’s Early Care and Education Association (ECEA) had heard from teachers at some of the 130 or so early learning programs in its network that they desperately needed subs. They were saying, according to Amy Brooks, the group’s executive director, “We can’t do more meditation and mindfulness. We don’t need a workshop. We need a day off.”

“They have PTO they can’t use,” Brooks says, “because it would close a classroom.”

ECEA launched the Career Cultivator program to help build a pipeline of future full-time early childhood educators. Over the course of 10 weeks (soon to be 12), participants go through all the requisite health and safety training and vetting, take college courses and then enroll in the sub pool, where they are required to work at least one eight-hour shift before completing the program.

Many Career Cultivator participants work many more shifts than that.

In the last year-and-a-half, they have filled 325 jobs, says Katie Hopps, who manages the program and software for the sub pool for ECEA. That’s only about a quarter of the jobs that have been listed requesting help, she acknowledges — “we could definitely use more subs” — but is still an accomplishment, since the program has only graduated 35 people to date.

The ECEA sub pool, by design, sees subs cycling out of the program as they eventually go on to get hired full-time in early childhood settings. But that pipeline is routinely replaced, Brooks says, which she knew was essential.

“Just creating a sub pool doesn’t do anything,” Brooks says. “You have to feed it.”

One of the features that has made the program successful, she says, is getting program directors in the ECEA network to agree on a set wage ($15.50 an hour) to pay subs. That allows “large corporate programs,” as Brooks put it, to compete with the “small church-basement programs.”

Wonderschool, the child care solutions provider, launched SubPool in fall 2023 after hearing from leaders in Mississippi that the state’s 1,000-plus licensed early childhood providers were facing an acute shortage of substitute teachers.

It has grown to be one of the largest early childhood sub pools in the country, says Moss of Wonderschool. Since the initiative began, Wonderschool has had over 10,000 people apply to be substitutes in Mississippi; about 450 people are active subs in the system today. In the first 14 months, they had seen 5,800 jobs worked, equivalent to about 40,000 hours.

Sylvester, the provider in Jackson, has been using the Wonderschool SubPool since it launched.

“As soon as I heard about it, I was ready,” she says. “I knew how desperately I was in need of help.”

Ever since the pandemic, Sylvester says, staff had been hard to come by, and substitutes were almost “impossible” to find. “It was a real issue.”

There are times when Sylvester needs three or four subs in a single day. SubPool has met that need, she says.

When Sylvester needs a sub, she posts a job listing to the platform, providing details such as which age group the sub will be working with and how many days they are needed.

“As soon as I put it out,” Sylvester says, “I can hear my phone: ‘beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.’ I get 10 people” right away.

(Subs, for their part, set a geographic radius on their account, indicating how far they are willing to travel for jobs.)

Sylvester can choose to auto-accept the first person to claim the job, or she can go through and see who has said they’re available. She usually does the latter, and if she recognizes the name of someone she already worked with and had a good experience with, she’ll choose them.

Any sub using the platform has already been screened and onboarded by Wonderschool, Moss explains. Wonderschool follows the state’s requirements for substitute teacher qualifications.

The individuals who use SubPool tend to fall into one of four categories, Moss adds. They are college students or recent college graduates interested in early care and education. They are retired early childhood educators with flexibility to pick up odd shifts here and there. They are stay-at-home moms whose kids are in school. Or they’re someone looking for a second job with a schedule they can choose.

The pilot in Mississippi has gone so well, Moss says, that Wonderschool is now in conversation with a “number of states” that want to bring the program to their early childhood programs.

“I think we’re going to be quite busy,” he says.