City promises 2,000 extra teachers, but leaders seek 10,000
City officials promised Monday to scrounge up an additional 2,000 teachers to help fill staffing shortages plaguing the city’s partial school reopening plan — but critics say the influx of staffers will barely scratch the surface of the personnel crunch.
“The 2,000 additional teachers the mayor referenced in his press conference today is woefully short of the over 10,000 teachers that we estimate New York City principals have already requested,” Mark Cannizzaro (inset), the president of the city principalsncipals unionunion, said Monday.
The pledge from city officials comes just one week before schools are set to open for in-person classes — and two days before they begin online orientation for students.
“We are committed to an additional 2,000 educators immediately, and we’ll keep working with each school to make surewhattheyneediswhatthey get, and that we’re ready for opening day,” said Mayor de Blasio on Monday.
Roughly 1,000 of the additional teachers will come from central offices, another 1,000 from substitute teaching positions, and about 100 from the absent teacher reserve pool for educators who weren’t previously assigned to a school, according to the Education Department.
About 450 of the central office staffers will be pulled from the successful and popular universal literacy initiative that provides coaches to help schools teach reading.
The reassignments mean “that we’re going to stop doing some things,” conceded city Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza. “And it doesn’t mean that the things that we’re stopping doing weren’t good things or aren’t good things. It’s just a matter of prioritizing what we need to prioritize right here and right now.”
But even with the 2,000 reinforcements, city principals, union leaders and lawmakers warn schools won’t have the manpower to staff a dizzying array of online and in-person classes.
“There is now a week to go before students return to schools, and the city and DOE clearly have no comprehensive plan to fully staff our schools,” principals union chief Cannizzaro wrote in a Monday statement.
City Councilman Mark Treyger said schools in southern Brooklyn alone have requested 2,000 additional teachers. Officials from the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, the principals union, estimated schools across the city have asked for a total of 10,000 extra staff.
An Education Department spokeswoman k didn’t specify how many additional staff have been requested overall.
“The 2,000 centrally funded educators is one important step we are taking, and we’re still looking at other strategies to fill additional gaps,” said agency spokeswoman Danielle Filson.
The staffing crunch springs from logistical challenges posed by the city’s partial school reopening plan, in which roughly 600,000 of the city’s million public school students are currently slated to switch between in-person and remote learning, while the remaining 400,000 will stay remote full-time.
Because of class-size limits dictated by social-distancing requirements, schools will have to offer more sections of in-person courses. Adding to the logistical puzzle, roughly 16,000 of the city’s 75,000 city teachers are approved to work from home because they have medical conditions.
On top of all that, because of budgetrestrictions, schoolswere only recently allowed to start hiring to fill vacant positions left by departing teachers, nearly 1,200 of whom retired in June and July, according to the New York Teacher Retirement Service, the teachers pension fund.
Last summer, schools hired about 4,000 new teachers in preparation for the start of the school year. “We have 10 teachers with medical accommodations,” said Jeff Chetirko, principal of Urban Assembly New York Harbor School on Governors Island. “That’s about a quarter of my faculty. So far we’ve been told we’re getting three, which is really tough.”