Mary Noone had not planned to retire from teaching science at Pottsgrove High School in March 2021, but then came COVID.
Noone, who taught biology, applied sciences and anatomy since 1999, got into teaching late in life, so she had not intended to go a full 30 years in education.
But she had hoped to make it to 2022.
That is when a new teaching contract is to be negotiated and retirement incentives are likely to be offered by the district in an effort to reduce payroll by replacing higher-paid teachers with newer, lower-paid ones.
“But COVID pushed me out the door,” she told MediaNews Group.
Her husband had gone through two bouts of chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin lymphoma and it was not immediately clear if his immune system would benefit from a vaccine as much as a healthy person’s.
After teaching virtually for months, and with a scheduled back surgery coming up over the Christmas holiday, Noone decided she did not want to return to the classroom and put her husband’s health at risk.
She has another friend in the district near retirement “who is thinking about pulling the trigger a little sooner than she thought she would. It’s been a tough couple of years and for those close to retirement, it definitely makes it more tempting.”
These teachers are just two among thousands who left the profession during the pandemic, creating a void in schools that is becoming increasingly hard to fill.
The new math
It’s no secret that during the pandemic, many people either lost their jobs or left them — some unwilling to put themselves and their families at risk for low pay, others simply re-evaluating their work-life balance in the face of a worldwide crisis.
At 4.4 million, the number of Americans quitting jobs was historically high in February. More than 4.5 million people quit in November, the most in two decades of records, according to the Associated Press.
And a higher percentage of those who walked away worked in education than in other fields, the expansion of an existing trend.
The nation, and Pennsylvania in particular, was already suffering from a feeble supply of new teachers before the pandemic hit. COVID only made it worse.
According to a June 2021 survey of 2,690 members of the National Education Association, 32% said the pandemic drove them to plan to leave the profession earlier than expected, AP reported.
Another survey by the Rand Corp. said the pandemic exacerbated attrition, burnout and stress on teachers, who were almost twice as likely as other employed adults to feel frequent job-related stress and almost three times more likely to experience depression.
And it’s not just teachers.
There has even been an exodus of top-level administrators. In 2021-22, Pottsgrove, Boyertown, Owen J. Roberts and Spring-Ford all hired superintendents.
In Pottsgrove, longtime high school Principal William Ziegler and Assistant Principal Eric Daney both moved on to other jobs before the school year even finished.
Others, like bus drivers and food workers, were idled, either voluntarily or not, when school buildings closed and learning was delivered remotely.
With no students to transport or feed, there was no work at school, so many found work elsewhere. With school back in session, many of those positions remain open and hard to fill.
The challenge — or rather one of the dozens of challenges now faced by schools — has been to replace those people now that schools are back in session.
Some of those challenges are being met in innovative ways invented during the pandemic, while others remain, well, challenging.
‘This is too much’
“We’re still not fully staffed,” Matthew Boyer, director of human resources for the Pottstown School District said in late March.
Boyer saw the COVID-driven staff challenges from two perspectives. When the pandemic first hit, he was serving as the principal of Pottsgrove Middle School, a post he had held since 2017. Then in 2021, mid-pandemic, he returned to Pottstown as a central office administrator.
When he was still a principal, “I was talking to teachers last March and with the virtual learning, and the masks, they were saying ‘this is too much’ and they would be retiring or just leaving,” Boyer said.
Then, when he became an administrator in charge of hiring, “we couldn’t hire until we knew when school would be starting and we still had positions open in October. That meant people were being switched into different positions and that led to more teachers saying ‘I’m done,’ ” he said.
Finally, when schools reopened, “you basically had kids who had been out of school for two years so some of the student behavior problems were off the chart,” said Boyer.
And the stresses go beyond the traditional classroom teacher.
“It’s not just teachers, it’s nurses, custodians and paraprofessionals,” he said referring to aides who work in the classrooms with teachers, facing all of the same difficulties and virus exposure for much less money.
“That is my hardest hire. They can go work at Amazon and make $18 an hour,” said Boyer.
As a result, Pottstown has added pay incentives to attract and retain both paraprofessionals and nurses.
Turn to technology
So what else is a personnel director to do?
What everyone did, of course, was turn to technology.
“We now have a much-improved hiring process. We can do it on Zoom,” Boyer said. “We just hired a guy who lives in California. Before COVID, that never would have happened.
“We also have a standard questionnaire and we video-record the applicant responses. That way, several people can watch the video on their schedule, and the applicant doesn’t have to come in five times to see five different people and answer the same questions.”
At Spring-Ford Area School District, where teacher pay is higher than in Pottstown, there were still dozens and dozens of teachers leaving.
“We do have quite a few teacher retirements coming up at the end of the year,” said Elizabeth Leiss, district director of human resources.
So, to “get a really good jump on the hiring season,” the district held a job fair last month, attracting 140 visitors, she said.
“It’s kind of a one-stop-shop,” said district Superintendent Robert Rizzo. “It’s a great way to expedite the process and make it more personal.”
Bus drivers: ‘A lot of them moved on’
School bus drivers are among those driven from their jobs by the pandemic.
Just ask Dennis Ryan and John Coakley.
They are the program administrator and assistant program administrator for transportation at the Berks County Intermediate Unit, respectively.
The agency not only provides regular school bus service for the Reading and Muhlenberg school districts but other more specialized services for all Berks County districts.
The agency has 250 bus runs per day, some of which are 100 miles long. And lately, many of those runs are completed with Ryan and Coakley behind the wheel.
“We were out this morning and we’ll be out again this afternoon,” Coakley said with a laugh during a midday phone interview.
“It’s all hands on deck,” Ryan added.
“It’s been very difficult for us. This whole industry was struggling before the pandemic, and the pandemic really broke the back of the school bus industry,” Ryan said.
He has been in the business for 15 years, starting as a school bus driver to make money while attending college, and running school bus systems in districts in Chester and Delaware counties.
Since he arrived at the BCIU at the beginning of 2021, Ryan has hired more than 80 drivers, meaning the agency lost more than 30% of its drivers during the pandemic.
“That’s quite a turnover rate,” he said.
That’s partly because the driving jobs disappeared when the students stayed home to learn.
“With no hours to work, a lot of them moved on to something more sustainable,” Ryan said. “They could go to Target and get a job with better pay and benefits. And a lot of them did.”
The shortage also occurred because of who most bus drivers are.
The industry has long leaned on retired seniors to drive school buses and, with the elderly at greater risk for COVID infection and more severe impacts from those infections, the potential risk was too high for many.
As a result, employee losses were higher at school bus operations than in some other industries.
Not to mention, “it’s not an easy job, to begin with, keeping an eye on 40 or 50 kids while driving a 30,000-pound vehicle,” Ryan said.
Pay and incentives
One of the most significant things the BCIU is doing is raising bus driver pay by nearly 23%. The lowest-paid drivers saw their pay rise $4 from $17.55 to $21.55 per hour. The most experienced drivers now make $25.75 per hour.
Reliable drivers also get a perfect attendance bonus every quarter for those who do not miss a shift.
Another change the pandemic forced is looking at reducing the requirements to become a school bus driver.
Pennsylvania has some of the most stringent requirements in the country for those who looking to get behind the wheel of a school bus. Ryan said there is talk of removing a requirement to name engine parts to get certified, what he called the under-the-hood requirement.
“We have mechanics who work on the buses and a driver still does a walk-around inspection to make sure a bus is safe to drive before leaving on a run, but it’s not like they’re going to repair the bus on the road,” he said.
Work in progress
“Overall, the school bus industry didn’t respond well and we’re just now starting to look at our demographics and realizing people need more money and full-time wages,” Coakley said.
But despite these improvements, the struggle continues. When they have to, BCIU has had to merge some routes, and split others.
Ryan said he came away from a recent conference by the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials with the conclusion that “we’re all doing everything we can to try to resolve these issues and changing what can be changed to fix it for the future, but as of now, there is no silver bullet.”
What comes next?
The pandemic may have put a sharper focus on Pennsylvania’s teacher shortage, but don’t expect the supply of new teachers to increase any time soon.
In the past 10 years, “Pennsylvania has experienced a 66% decline in the number of entry-level teaching certificates to in-state college graduates, and a 58% decline in certificates issued to out-of-state graduates,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported recently.
“In the 2010-11 academic year, Pennsylvania granted 21,045 new education certifications — basically a state license that says a graduate is qualified to teach — according to the state Department of Education. By the 2019-20 academic year, that figure had dropped to just below 7,000,” the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported in January.
And the trend is not just in Pennsylvania.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States had a net loss of 65,000 public education workers in the year ending with October.
“This is not sustainable, and we anticipate it will continue to get worse,” Rich Askey, the president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, Pennsylvania’s largest teachers union, told a Senate Democratic Policy Committee hearing in January.
Making the situation more difficult is a growing shortage of people interested in being substitute teachers.
In December, Gov. Tom Wolf signed Act 91, making it easier to be a substitute teacher, lifting restrictions on inactive certifications and the number of days that can be worked, among other things.
But it is a stop-gap measure at best, and it can be even harder to recruit a regular supply of substitute teachers than full-timers.
That shortage has left many teachers tasked with covering empty classrooms during planning time, adding one more straw to the camel’s already-strained back.
Fewer available teachers kick a set of broader policy questions up the chain of command in public schools. How do you deliver education with fewer delivery people?
Potential scenarios
Barring sizeable pay increases, decided individually by 500 school boards and less plausible in lower-wealth school districts, the most immediately obvious alternatives include larger class sizes and more remote learning.
“We may get to the point where a teacher may not want to teach a class much larger than 25 or 30, but they can do a virtual class of 50,” said Boyer.
What would that look like in the long run?
“If we have 300 virtual students and 200 of them are at the high school, that’s a big change. Do we even need such a big building?” Boyer pondered.
But teaching a class is more than just standing in front of students, said the recently retired Noone. It’s grading papers, tests and homework.
“An increase in class size is not going to get any more people to want to go into teaching,” she predicted. “Say it brings the total number of students you’re responsible for from 120 to 200. That’s not palatable for anyone. The last thing teachers need is more on their plate.”
Leaning more into virtual also takes away from the value in education that comes from personal relationships teachers develop with students, helping them explore options for their future, she said.
“Getting to know the students, finding out what their interests are, developing those relationships those million little conversations you have over the course of the school year, those are so important,” Noone said.
John Armato, the Pottstown School District’s director of community relations and a member of the school board, couldn’t agree more.
“Technology gives us a lot more options, and creates more opportunities and still allows us to be focused on our mission,” said Armato, long a proponent of the value of personal relationships.
He has a warning for becoming overly virtual in education.
“We may soon have to judge what we’re losing by doing too much through screens. We’re losing that personal contact,” Armato said. “Five or 10 years from now, we’ll start to see the impact of what we’re doing now.”
“The bottom line is the virtual elements are never going away,” said Boyer.
“We had to figure out how to do it on the fly on March 12, 2020, and a lot of people needed training to do that, but some of the younger folks figured it out real quick and they are the ones who are coming up now,” he said.
Perhaps they will be the ones to solve the puzzle, he added.
Whatever future school holds for children, nothing is set in stone. What does seem sure is that public education will never be the same after the pandemic.
“Right now, everybody is struggling to figure out what we do next,” Boyer said. “It already feels like such a long time ago, but it was only last year.”
