Schools enlist aid in hunt for fill-ins

Kelly Services is helping two local school districts in the increasingly competitive sport of finding substitute teachers.
By RON COLE
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
It's shortly before 6 a.m. on a chilly Monday morning.
South Avenue in Boardman, which in three hours will be bustling with traffic, sits mostly idle, gently illuminated by streetlights and disrupted only by the occasional passing car.
In the Windham Professional Centre, across from Giant Eagle and Wal-Mart, the offices of doctors, accountants, lawyers and other businesses are dark. The parking lot is nearly empty.
But at Kelly Services, the lights blaze brightly and the telephones ring.
Laura Hamer cradles a telephone between her shoulder and ear. It's the secretary at Girard High School on the line. A teacher has called off sick, and the school needs a substitute.
It's Hamer's job to find one, and she has only 90 minutes before school starts.
The hunt begins: Hamer swings her chair to her computer and taps on the keys, searching Kelly's database of substitute teachers. She grabs the phone and pounds in a number.
A busy signal. More tapping on the keyboard. She dials another number.
"Hi, Elaine; this is Laura from Kelly," she says. "Are you working today?"
Elaine says she's already assigned to another school. Hamer hangs up, finds another number, makes another call.
By 6:25 a.m., she locates a substitute for the Girard job.
Two minutes later, the telephone rings. This time, it's the secretary at Brookfield High School. The school needs a math substitute teacher.
Hamer feverishly searches the database, picks up the telephone -- and the search starts anew.
Every school day, secretaries and principals at schools across the Mahoning and Shenango valleys -- and the nation, for that matter -- play their own little game of beat-the-clock: finding substitute teachers.
Shortage: In the past five years, with the supply dwindling, the daily race to find substitutes and find them first has reached a fever pitch.
In fact, most school superintendents in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys say they often don't find enough subs, leaving principals scrambling to fill classrooms.
"You can't just shut the line down," said Anthony D'Ambrosio, Girard schools superintendent. "You can't just send the kids home. You have to deal with it."
So, this school year, D'Ambrosio turned to Kelly Services, a temporary-employment service known for its "Kelly girls," to recruit, screen and schedule Girard's substitute teachers.
Kelly launched its educational staffing division in 1999, and today, it provides substitute teachers to 550 schools in 25 states. Girard was the first Kelly school district in Ohio; Brookfield schools signed up in December.
Mark Leone, manager of Kelly's Boardman office, said he thinks more and more Mahoning Valley districts will follow.
"Our No. 1 goal is to make sure those classrooms are filled with qualified substitute teachers," Leone said. "That's the business we're in. That's what we do best."
Objections: Critics, however, say school districts shouldn't be turning over a responsibility as important as placing teachers in classrooms to a private agency with little background in education.
In addition, critics say, the money paid to Kelly could best be used to boost the pay of substitute teachers.
"People in education know education best," said Ann Bayou, a consultant with the Ohio Education Association in Dayton. "I don't think Kelly has that."
"If it becomes a trend, I think we'll see less-qualified people in classrooms rather than a better supply of well-qualified people," said Tom Mooney, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. "Kelly is just going to look for placing somebody in a classroom and collect a fee. They're not going to care how well-qualified they are."
Wrong, D'Ambrosio and Leone say.
Before contracting with Kelly, Girard principals and school secretaries spent two to three hours each morning on the telephone lining up as many as 12 substitutes, D'Ambrosio said.
"We did that day in, day out," he added.
And even then, the district often couldn't find enough subs.
In the high school, students in vacant classes were sent to the library, or full-time teachers would be paid a stipend to fill in the vacant class periods. In the elementary schools, children in teacherless classrooms were split and assigned to different teachers for the day.
"In many cases, our principals ended up teaching," D'Ambrosio said.
When D'Ambrosio found out about the Kelly program, he called the Boardman office.
"They have the time and the energy to go out and recruit and screen, and do a lot of the paperwork we would normally do, and to find more people, get us more bodies," he said.
How it works: Under the contract with Girard and Brookfield, Kelly recruits and screens all substitute-teaching applicants, ensuring that they have the proper state teaching certifications and performing criminal-background checks. Kelly also provides a brief orientation program.
The list of subs then goes to the local superintendent and school board, which approves the names and sends them back to Kelly. The subs are employed and paid by the school district.
Each morning, the school principal or secretary informs Kelly of the number and types of substitutes needed for the day. Kelly finds subs from the approved list.
"Our time and services each morning now can go more toward our students, our families and the community," said Joanne Carmello, principal of Prospect Elementary School in Girard.
Through March 31, Girard and Brookfield asked Kelly to fill 1,158 substitute positions, Leone said. Kelly filled all but 36, a rate of 97 percent.
Costs: The districts pay $14.22 a day to Kelly for each substitute placed.
As of April 3, Girard has paid Kelly $12,243 to place 861 subs this school year, D'Ambrosio said. He estimated that the total cost by the end of the school year will be about $15,000.
Brookfield Superintendent Joseph White did not return three telephone calls to his office. His secretary said White did not want to talk about the district's arrangements with Kelly.
Girard is making up Kelly's fee, in part, by reducing pay for some substitute teachers.
Daily pay: Last year, Girard paid $47 a day to substitutes and $75 a day to "core subs," a group of about two dozen teachers committed to substituting in the school district, D'Ambrosio said.
This year, all substitutes are paid $65 a day. Add Kelly's fee, and each sub costs Girard $79.22 a day.
Linda Costello, one of the core subs, said she wasn't pleased that her daily rate was cut from $75 to $65. She also said she wasn't aware of the Kelly fee.
"I don't know what to think about that," she said.
She said she was concerned that she might lose some substitute days under the arrangement with Kelly.
"So far, it's been OK," she said. "All I know is that I'm getting calls, and I'm getting my days."
"My question would be, why don't they do the work themselves and give that money to the subs?" asked Marilyn Crain, a substitute teacher who works mostly for the Jackson-Milton schools.
"Has it gotten that bad?" Sherri Morgan, president of the 822-teacher Youngstown Education Association, said about the contracts with Kelly. "I don't know if I'd want to take that responsibility away from the local board."
Criticism: Shirley Kirsten, a substitute teacher in Fresno, Calif., and president of the National Substitute Teachers Alliance, said she thinks Kelly's venture into education is bad.
"The very notion that any educational system would contract to a for-profit agency speaks to the failure of that district to come to grips with its responsibility of placing substitute teachers in the classroom," she said. "And it denigrates and devalues a teacher if you can just simply contract out the job to a private agency."
Control: D'Ambrosio said Girard's substitutes are treated well, and he emphasized that the board maintains control over all substitutes.
"If we're not pleased with a sub, we can tell Kelly that, and then we never get that sub again," said Carmello, Prospect principal. "It isn't out of our hands. We determine who the subs will and will not be."
Leone said Kelly has about 100 approved substitutes on its calling list and that it hopes to recruit more through advertising and job fairs at Youngstown State University.
He said he is in discussions with five or six other local schools about signing on with the service.
"We want this to be successful, so we're taking our time," he said. "We don't want to just bring in a whole bunch of school districts at once."
Other area districts: Officials with other area school districts said they also face a critical shortage of substitutes and can understand the move to Kelly Services.
Germaine Bennett, Youngstown schools personnel director, said the district can't fill the approximately 40 substitute-teaching positions needed daily.
"We're trying to do everything possible to increase the number of subs and do some things to retain our subs before we go into that kind of service," she said.
Leetonia Superintendent Lynn King and Sharon Superintendent Richard Rossi said they have no problem with a school district's using an outside employment agency, but they questioned Kelly's ability to increase the pool of substitutes.
"There's a restricted supply out there," King said.
"If they have a secret to attracting substitutes, I don't know what it's going to be," Rossi said. "If they can do it, they'll be a hit."