Teacher shortages have been a prevalent issue in the district for about 14 years. In the state of Florida, we currently have 12,000 unfilled positions, 7,000 being teachers and the other 5,000 being staff, as stated by the Florida Education Association (FEA). This is due to low salaries, increased workload, and the attitude of students.
This problem has affected Cape Coral High School, causing counselors to work outside of their criteria and also become teachers to students rather than just counselors. Catherine Drake, a guidance counselor here at Cape High, is currently covering a class of seniors who are finishing an English course online. “The students are working on Edgenuity to finish their English class online so I’m just kind of helping them with making sure they’re able to connect to the program, to correspond with the teacher who is working with them,” said Drake.
Drake was asked if she could cover the class and she was more than willing to help these students with passing their class. “I was asked to cover the class you know as a favor and it’s something that I wanted to be able to do, I want to be supportive and a team player when our school needs it,” explained Drake. Thankfully, Drake was glad to be able to help the school, but it doesn’t resolve the issue that limits Cape High.
Drake also mentioned how it’s difficult to balance being a counselor and also helping the seniors with passing their English course. “It is second period and usually first thing in the morning is when a lot of things come up,” said Drake. “It is a little difficult to balance. But otherwise, while I’m in there, I enjoy working with the kids.”
Teacher shortages have greatly affected counselors here at Cape High and they don’t think it will get any better. “I feel like we are going to continue to see teacher shortages, unless, you know, there are some drastic changes and they give teachers more of an incentive to work in this field,” explained Drake. She mentions how teachers aren’t paid enough to be able to live in areas like these and if this continues then it will only increase.
Cape High currently has 85 teachers and two vacancies that are being interviewed for. There are also 23 teachers teaching seven periods a day due to the problem. Outside of these 23 teachers, the rest are usually covering for other classes, meaning they don’t get a proper planning period.
If teachers don’t have a planning period and are covering during it, all the work that they do during that period gets pushed into being work they have to do outside of school, and which they don’t get paid for. “It makes it really hard during the school day when we are supposed to have planning periods and we have to cover for other classes because that’s time that normally we would be giving students feedback and planning future assignments and lessons every single week,” said Pre-IB and IB English teacher Jaclyn Schroder.
Teacher shortages have also affected the jobs of staff members like Troy Beall, one of the assistant principles here at Cape High. “The shortage of guest teachers has affected our office staff and our teaching staff. Each morning, our office staff has to pull the list of teachers that has called out for sick or personal reasons and see if a guest teacher has picked up the job for the day,” said Beall.
Every day is different in terms of how many teachers are going to have to cover during their planning period. This unpredictability contributes to teachers having to take time out of their day, outside of school, to do work that should’ve been finished during school. Assignments take longer to get graded, emails take longer to get answered, and overall it stresses everyone out.
People need to acknowledge that teachers work hard and sacrifice their own time to cover classes without proper compensation. It affects the time that they should be spending with family and not worrying about grades. This is causing more teachers to resign all over the United States and it is an issue that needs to be solved for the future of education.
