Elizabeth Marini started her career at Hamden High School 16 years ago in the English Language Arts Department as a 10th-grade English teacher. She adopted the role as a literacy specialist in 2016, now having to balance both jobs amidst a staffing shortage in the district.
“I feel like at a moment’s notice, I have to kind of fly into any particular teacher’s classroom and help out,” Marini said.
Hamden Public School District has 556 teachers and 1,188 total staff members employed, according to Hamden human resource specialist Michelina Cevetillo.
Since August 23, 2021, 104 teachers and staff have left the direct and 106 teachers have been hired.
According to a 2022 survey of 4,104 pre-K-12 teachers across the U.S. from AdoptAClassroom.org, 80% of participants considered leaving the profession before the 2022-23 academic year because of burnout. However, of those surveyed, 65% contemplated quitting due to the lack of support staff.
Before advocating for herself this academic year, Marini said she had to fill the roles of teaching every grade and level of English on top of her regular duties.
“The last few years I had been completely overextended,” Marini said. “I really have been trying to do the jobs of two, maybe even three people as one person.”
Now, Marini teaches three classes of 10th-grade English and two sections of African American literature.
Despite the lightened load, she said educators have been “feeling that burden exponentially over the last few years.”
“You can’t pour from an empty cup,” Marini said. “I just felt like my cup was bone dry in the middle of the year, each year.”
Tai Richardson, a parent in the district, had his son graduate from HHS last year and has two daughters who attend Ridge Hill Elementary School.
He said the teacher shortage has primarily altered education at the high school over other schools within the district.
“There were periods where the young people had to either be in the library or in the auditorium (in the high school) because there weren’t enough staff,” Richardson said.
Similarly, the concerns with the shortage in Hamden are also reflected on the state level.
Connecticut Education Association Vice President Joslyn DeLancey said there are roughly 12,000 vacancies in classroom-certified staff and nearly 13,000 vacancies in education staff across Connecticut.
“That’s like the 25,000 adults missing from our Connecticut schools, which is kind of a scary prospect to think about,” DeLancey said.
Although Richardson voiced concern about the quality of his son’s education because of the shortage, he said his focus is on what he can do as a parent to “support the initiatives to get things back to where they need to be.”
“I try to give a little grace,” Richardson said. “I understand that there’s a lot of moving pieces and a lot of things they’re dealing with that go unnoticed.”
However, employee workloads and the worries about students’ education are not the only issues tacked on from the shortage, some teachers said.
Elaine Livingstone was a former English teacher at HHS for just short of 11 years.
On top of a strenuous amount of tasks, she said her safety as an employee was a reason for leaving the position.
Livingstone told HQNN about an instance when she broke up a verbal dispute between two students while supervising the hallway, an aspect of her job that was not in the description.
“It was me and the doorknob and the door and my body between him and killing this other kid,” Livingstone said. “But it was just about four or five minutes before a security person could come and relieve me from that doorknob.”
Livingstone and the students were unharmed, but she said the experience shook her to the point of reevaluating her purpose and what she wanted to do with her time as an educator.
While Livingstone said the district is not at fault for the shortage issues, she said all the circumstances made an unsafe situation.
“These problems are enormous,” Livingstone said. “There’s no way to look at it and even Band-Aid all of this kind of restructuring.”
Richardson said that he had conversations with his children about how to carry themselves in school based on “the reality we’re dealing with.”
However, he said he is optimistic that the district has and is working on solutions to improve safety in the schools, especially post-pandemic.
“I don’t believe that teachers should be referees,” Richardson said. “I don’t believe that teachers should be putting themselves in the line of fire. But I do know that it was a reality of life, definitely from 2020 to 2021.”
Although always worried about his children, Richardson said the shortage has revealed “how much of heroes that teachers are and how undervalued they are in our society.”
Similarly, DeLancey believes the issue with the shortage comes down to how teachers are being treated within their roles and the support they receive. She said CEA is working to develop teacher recruitment and retention legislative package to incentivize being in the profession.
“We’re trying to figure out what makes sense to do at a state level legislatively, and what makes sense to do kind of more at the local town level,” DeLancey said.