The Wellington Catholic District School Board is joining others across southern Ontario forced to hire unqualified teachers to fill shortages.
Michael Glazier, director of education at the WCDSB, said while the board has been fortunate to fully staff teaching positions — 600 permanent and occasional teachers in total — in both in-person and remote learning, they are facing some supply teacher shortages.
“We have been able to cover classes when this occurs through a variety of means and we have been using unqualified teachers as one option to assist with classroom and student supervision,” said Glazier.
Currently, he said, the board is recruiting for both qualified teachers and unqualified teaching positions.
The job posting for classroom and student supervisors on the board website requires that applicants have completed Grade 12 education. Their primary role is to supervise and sometimes follow the plans the classroom teacher provided with support from the principal.
“These are typically people that are known to us within our schools. They have police checks completed, we provide them with initial training and in some cases, they can be a board employee but they’re just in a different job classification,” said Glazier.
He also added that the board is reaching out to those individuals who pursued a teaching career seven years ago and were unable to find jobs because of the excessive number of teachers in the province.
Waterloo Region, Huron-Perth and Avon Maitland are also among school boards in southern Ontario who’ve had to turn to hire unqualified teachers.
“It’s used as the last resort,” said Glazier.
“When we’re not able to find qualified teachers to fill in for teachers then we would typically look to see how we can support the supervision of the classroom,” said Glazier, adding that sometimes it means a teacher switches classes and other times the board will employ unqualified teachers.
Glazier said the board hired many teachers at the beginning of the school year to reduce class sizes which means many of their occasional supply teachers are now in permanent positions with the board.
“We’re continually recruiting new qualified teachers as well as people who might serve as a bit of emergency supply teachers," said Glazier.
The Upper Grand District School Board is occasionally short of teachers when covering daily absences. To fill that gap, they're hiring occasional qualified teachers to cover daily assignments and long-term vacancies, according to Heather Loney, communications coordinator at the UGDSB.
"The board’s preference is always to use qualified teachers as supply teachers, however, we are currently considering our options in the event that we cannot cover classes with qualified teachers. This may include having a list of unqualified teachers to use as emergency supply teachers in the event we do not have enough qualified teachers to cover all classes on a given day," said Loney.
She said while the board has had no issue filling English teaching jobs, it is experiencing difficulty filling French teaching positions.
Currently, there are over 1,500 permanent teachers and 639 occasional teachers employed in UGDSB’s elementary schools. Some of these numbers overlap.
In UGDSB’s secondary schools, there are approximately 800 full-time permanent teachers and 280 occasional teachers. They also plan on adding 30 additional qualified teachers at the end of October.
“We will continue to staff and hire to fill positions and meet the needs of the system, especially once we have a better idea of how many students will make the switch between in-person and remote learning in November,” said Loney, adding that the board will continue to temporarily replace permanent teachers on leave.
“At this point, schools maintain a list of emergency contacts who are available to cover in the event that a vacancy is not filled by an occasional teacher on our roster. We are currently looking into ways that this list can be expanded if the needs warrant.”
