SALT LAKE CITY – School districts across Utah are reporting problems meeting all replacement teacher needs, but some areas are more difficult than others.
ESS Substitute Teacher Services offers substitute teachers for 4 school districts and 2 charter schools. They say it is particularly difficult to find a willing substitute teacher in Ogden.
Joseph Fitzgerald, Vice President of Operations at ESS, said, “We don’t have a high fill rate in Ogden. We definitely need people in this area. ”
Fitzgerald suggests that one reason may be that the people who are available as substitute teachers in Ogden tend to be older than in areas where they have no problem getting substitutes into classrooms, such as Alpine and Utah Counties Substitute teacher.
“I know we’re younger than our subpool at Alpine, which has helped us where Ogden has gotten older. Individuals have been more reluctant to work because of the higher risk, ”explains Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald continued, “I have actually advocated that it is more important to vaccinate replacements over full-time teachers because replacements could be in five different buildings in the same week.”
“In every school district we’ve worked in, we’ve locked our staff in to get access to the vaccine,” said Fitzgerald.
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