Quick, we need lots of teachers
A daunting hurdle still remains before city schools reopen.
After a summer of lastminute scrambles to ready city schools for in-person learning, what could be the toughest challenge yet is the recruitment, hiring and training of thousands of new teachers in just over a week.
Between 6,000 and 7,000 extra teachers will have to be in place when middle and high schools open Oct. 1 to staff a dizzying array of remote and in-person courses, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew told the Daily News.
“It’s gonna go right down to the wire. It’s not going to be easy,” he said.
City officials, who pushed back the start of in-person school last week to address the staffing crisis, have already committed to 4,500 new staff for elementary schools’ reopening Sept. 29, and acknowledged they’ll need even more for middle and high schools. They haven’t shared what that number is.
Mayor de Blasio was optimistic Tuesday about the progress.
“Those numbers are coming forward the way we need them to,” he said at a press conference. “There’s a lot of people looking for work … we will have the people we need.” Education Department officials didn’t immediately say how many new staff were already in place.
Critics argue the undertaking is an unprecedented hiring challenge with no guarantee of success — and one complicated by the city’s own rushed timeline.
“None of the challenges the mayor acknowledged in delaying school reopening were a surprise to anyone but the mayor,” said comptroller and mayoral candidate Scott Stringer. “And now the [Education Department] is attempting a staffing fire drill that should have started months ago.”
“Teacher hiring is a difficult task under good circumstances,” added Paula White, the executive director of Educators for Excellence New York, an organization that monitors it. And during a pandemic, with just over a week to accomplish the goal, “it’s a gargantuan task,” she said.
Staffing shortages in the partial reopening plan, where roughly half the city’s million students are slated to switch between in-person and remote learning while the other half remain fully remote, have been simmering for months.
Principals raised red flags in mid-August as they began to crunch the numbers of teachers out on medical accommodations alongside the number of students they’d need to supervise each day in smaller-than-normal groupings.