New Canaan schools face substitute shortage as more teachers call out sick, superintendent says

NEW CANAAN — While the town has a full roster of 460 full-time, certified teachers, the district is facing challenges finding enough substitutes, Superintendent Bryan Luizzi told a Board of Finance committee on Friday, while discussing the 2023-24 budget.

Luizzi said teacher absenteeism is up and they have been out for longer periods of time.

Luizzi said the district hopes to hire teaching interns instead of full-time substitutes, who have traditionally been certified teachers. The shortage of new teachers also means the district is not anticipating the savings it has experienced in the past by replacing retiring teachers with less experienced ones.

During the meeting with the finance board, Luizzi pointed out how other districts are experiencing teacher shortages, especially in special education. He specifically pointed to Norwalk Public Schools, which reported 65 vacancies in November, with 24 “specialized learning” positions open at the time.

Luizzi said staffing has been “really a challenge.” Luizzi said. More teachers are retiring and finding interns may be difficult.

“Not as many people are going into education, so when we look to fill these spots, the pool is much too shallow, and they may not all be there,” Luizzi said.

”So we’ve been fortunate in our staffing or total numbers of staffing, we are fully staffed on the certified side. However, the number of teaching assistants were a little bit low.”

The schools have 779 teachers and 783 are wanted for next year, with 318.8 non-certified staff, an addition of one for the 202324 budget.

The district has also found that new teachers are not as well prepared as previous years, since they lack in-classroom experience, Luizzi said.

Last year, the district started to pay $125 per day for substitutes, up 25 percent from the previous year. But Luizzi said all the districts in the area have also raised their pay for substitutes.

“If somebody has the flu or a teacher’s out with COVID or something where they’re going to be out for five or seven days, it really has a negative impact throughout that school for that day, because you’re pulling resources from all over to cover those classes, if you can’t get your substitutes,” Luizzi said.

The district pays tuition for the interns, often around $18,000, while they work in the town schools during the day and take classes to get a master’s in education at night.

“It’s really a mutual — it’s a great partnership that we have,” Luizzi said. One substitute for each school costs about the same as three interns, he explained.

The district hopes to replace full-time certified substitute teachers with intern who are studying at local colleges.

“If we cannot find the interns, we’re going to look to shift that money back into the substitute line and hire one building sub,” Luizzi said.

Luizzi prefers to having teaching interns or fulltime substitutes, because the “same person in there knows the school, knows the kids and can just pick up and keep going, it really makes a big difference,” the superintendent said.

Luizzi said the district has also not been able to hire as many less experienced teachers at lower rates to replace those who have retired.

The district is anticipating more retirees and “the labor market is more difficult to find people, so we are really having a harder and harder time hiring folks who are right out of school,” Luizzi said.

“Instead, we’re recruiting from other districts so that people who have 15 to 20 years of experience coming in, we’re just not seeing the same savings.”