What happens when a school asks its teachers to take charge of three classes at once? What happens when that teacher is now the sole supervisor of over 50 students in a single room? Are they even in charge anymore? How can they be sure all of the students are even present? What is stopping the teacher from leaving themself? What does that scenario look like?
“It looks like a building full of a ton of people,” said Elaine Livingstone, former English teacher at Hamden High School. “It makes it challenging to keep up with who’s even in the building. It’s unwieldy. It’s really really hard.”
That is life as of late for Hamden Public Schools.
Two of the biggest problems facing American public schools at the national level are staff shortages and chronic absenteeism.
Hamden’s truancy rate during the 2022-23 school year was 27.7%, down from 34.9% in 2021-22, but still higher than Connecticut’s state average, which is sitting at an even 20%, according to CT.gov EdSight data. The district is still looking to fill 34 position vacancies over two months into the 2023-24 school year.
An article from NPR said around 45% of schools nationally had at least one staff vacancy as of October 2022, and nearly a third of K-12 students missed at least 10% of school days during the 2022-23 school year.
Those vacancies are forcing teachers and other staff members to take on extra assignments in order to fill any cracks. The high school has educators taking on six teaching assignments during a school day instead of the usual five, with proper compensation.
David Abate, science teacher at Hamden High School and president of the Hamden Education Association, said this situation has become quite normal across the district.
“We’re sort of used to (staff turnover) in Hamden, people coming, people going,” Abate said. “I think we have something like 60 new hires this particular school year, which is above the average, but we filled the holes that we needed to fill to the best of our ability.”
Abate attributed some of the staff shortage in the district to the lack of pay teachers receive. Not just in Hamden, but across the country.
“The job simply doesn’t pay a fair salary,” Abate said.
The National Education Association reported the average teacher salary for the 2021-22 school year was $66,397. That number, when adjusted for inflation, was $2,179 less than it was a decade prior.
The average teacher’s salary across Connecticut in 2021 was $79,742, much higher than the $62,026 that Hamden teachers make on average.
These problems among others have created a teaching environment that has had negative effects on both students and teachers alike.
So What’s The Problem Here?
Despite the efforts to fill in any fractures that the staff shortages may create, the district’s sheer size still lets things slip through. The way the school worked to keep every student supervised despite shortages reached points of diminishing returns.
“When you’re short-staffed, what that looked like in my experience was combining three different classes and sticking them in a larger area like an auditorium with a single adult to supervise them,” Livingstone said. “It was common through the pandemic and the last time I was there, but I haven’t worked (at Hamden High School) since 2022.”
Mental health professionals like Glenn Xavier, a social worker at Hamden Middle School, are also affected by the size of the student population and staff shortages.
Xavier is one of three social workers in a school that teaches 836 students across the seventh and eighth grades. The one social worker for every 278 students ratio is slightly behind the national recommendation of one for every 250, according to the Connecticut Health I-Team.
The post-COVID-19 learning environment led to increased responsibility for social workers like Xavier.
“So post-COVID, certainly mental health has really come to the forefront,” Xavier said. “That in turn impacts our caseloads. A caseload of 30 pre-COVID has gone up into the 50-range … Because the numbers are so large, we need to divide and conquer.”
District administration, however, takes pride in the fact that each school in Hamden has mental health resources.
“We are so lucky in Hamden that we have a full-time social worker in every one of our elementary schools,” said Erin Bailey, assistant superintendent of elementary education of Hamden Public Schools. “In some, we actually have two social workers. There is that level of mental health support, and that is definitely helpful.”
The amount of mental health professionals hired district-wide totals to 15. Xavier does not expect that number to get any higher soon.
“The district is having their own difficulties in terms of budget,” Xavier said. “I’m not quite sure if that will be in the cards right now, to increase the (number of) social workers.”
My Kids Are Not in School. So What?
Eventually, chronic absenteeism and staff shortages can create gaps in learning for students that may not always show up on a test sheet.
Abate spoke about moments during his teaching career when he would have to reteach certain lessons to accommodate the students who were absent. Those moments led to classes falling behind, but also gave him a chance to correct any misconceptions that could have been planted in his students’ minds outside of the classroom.
Specifically, he mentioned a moment when a substantial portion of his class did not know the difference between degrees of latitude and longitude and degrees of temperature. The amount of backtracking that absenteeism forced him to do allowed him to correct the problem. A positive outlook on a negative school trend.
“I should have never assumed that (they understood),” Abate said. “I should have questioned that before I got into it … The only way to break that misconception is by having the students learn for themselves that it’s wrong.”
Absenteeism also has a near-obvious effect on a student’s social development.
Sandra Chafouleas, a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in educational psychology at UConn, says some forms of absenteeism might be due to circumstances outside of the classroom.
“A kid might miss some opportunities for social interaction,” Chafouleas said. “For some kids, that’s a good thing, right? Because if they’re experiencing bullying, or they aren’t feeling connected to school, then escaping from having to do that task could make you feel better.”
Regardless, time away from the classroom always catches up to a student.
“It can be a negative thing,” Chafouleas said. “You’re not getting the opportunity to practice social skills, and to be in a space where you can connect with others, which is critical to your emotional well being.”
Where Are The Rest of These Teachers?
For teachers to address these problems in the same vain as Abate, they need to be in the classroom. So where are they?
Some teachers that are leaving the district are departing because of a history of poor and often violent behavior from students and lack of discipline and care from administration.
Teachers like Livingstone and fellow former Hamden High School english teacher Lisa Stamidis both cited these issues as the final straw that prompted them to work elsewhere.
“I just couldn’t take it anymore. I’m not really set up for that,” Livingstone said. “It’s hard to describe how violently these kids hit each other. You either put yourself in a situation where you might endure bodily harm and then someone might call (The Department of Children and Families) on you for putting your hands on their child, even if your intentions were pure.”
Livingstone later described these instances as “alarmingly common.”
Even Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett recognizes the occurrence of the issues.
“It’s been increasingly hard for teachers to try to teach every day in a classroom where there are disruptions all day long,” Garrett said. “Young kids (are) sometimes being very violent because of not knowing how to regulate their emotions, their behaviors.”
Other teachers took to writing anonymous pieces about this issue.
One wrote two pieces for the CTL Conduit blog under the alias “The Albatross,” writing statements such as, “(Students) would much rather watch videos of their teachers getting beat up than pay attention to these teachers,” and, “Hamden students have always fought. The school’s track record is shameful.”
The misbehavior itself was not the problem for teachers like Stamidis, but the pattern of no consequences.
“Many times it felt like student misbehavior wasn’t really addressed,” Stamidis said. “I don’t blame the students. If there’s no consequence, they don’t really learn, they don’t really change. So, I think unfortunately, what you saw happen at at least the high school in the last few years is the result of not having any clear expectations, not having any real consequences.”
In the 2021-22 edition of the Hamden High School Green and Gold Guide, the last year Stamidis taught at Hamden High School, penalties for infractions such as forgery, suspicion of alcohol or drug use and vandalism all boiled down to an administrator’s discretion.
“If it’s left up to the administrator, three different administrators might handle it differently,” Stamidis said. “They might just say, ‘Well, my discretion was just to have a conversation with this child, and not actually give them a real consequence.’”
In the current Green and Gold Guide, the response for the infractions listed before and several others is, “Administration will investigate and process referrals for emergent major infraction; responses are administrator’s discretion.”
“It gave (administration) that leeway to be able to not hold the child accountable,” Stamidis said.
Teachers like Stamidis do not want to blame students and fellow educators on their departure.
“I loved the kids (in Hamden),” Stamidis said. “They brought me a lot of joy. I absolutely love my English department colleagues. We’re still very close even though we don’t work together anymore.”
Teachers may be leaving the district for those reasons, but another is the sheer amount of responsibility they are expected to assume in the current state of their profession.
“In this job, you’re on,” Abate said. “You’re on stage. You’re a brother, you’re a sister, you’re a father, you’re a mother, you’re an aunt, you’re an uncle, you’re a nurse, you’re a psychologist. You’re all of these things, and plus, you’re asked to teach.”
Well, What is the District Doing About This?
For the moment, the district wants to have their back as well as provide for the students.
Hiring more staff members is at the forefront of the district’s priorities, and it believes it is moving at a rate that will be sufficient.
“We’ve been able to fill positions I wouldn’t say super easily, especially when we’re talking about special ed certifications,” Bailey said. “Generally, we’ve been able to fill positions and get people where they need to be.”
Bailey confirmed earlier that she was sending job offers to five applicants. Based on the number of job openings in the district prior to the interview and as of publication, it can be assumed that three of the five positions were filled.
Mayor Garrett provided further assurance the district will continue working to solve the issue.
“The staffing shortages are certainly difficult to work through,” Garrett said. “I know that Hamden Public Schools are trying to hire as fast as they can.”
I know that Hamden Public Schools are trying to hire as fast as they can.
– Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett
To address absenteeism, Hamden Public School’s District Data Team began taking a deeper look at the root causes of the issue, meeting monthly since the start of the 2023-24 school year.
This new team is meant to assist with the current protocol the district follows to locate students who are chronically absent.
“We think we have a good handle on it,” Bailey said. “But you don’t really know until you’ve studied it from every angle.”
The district’s current protocol involves staff members, such as social workers, periodically reviewing a list of students who missed a select amount of school days to that point in the school year.
Once the students are identified, the staff members then research what the reported reasons for each student’s absences were, separating excused absences from proven truancy. If a specific reason appears to be a pattern amongst students, then the district will look for a way to address that issue specifically.
“Once we identify what roadblocks there may be, we provide the families with direct support that they would require,” Xavier said. “Whether it be a third-party program coming in to assist them, we have a better idea of how we can provide that support.”
A common example was issues with parental transportation.
“If a five-year-old isn’t coming to school, you really have to get to the parents,” Bailey said. “It’s not as if they’re not driving themselves in. They’re five.”
While the District Data Team looks to find a breakthrough on this issue, none have been discovered as of publication.
Above all, there is optimism for the district’s future.
“I feel like we’re in a pretty good place in Hamden,” Bailey said. “It’s sometimes difficult because the outside pressures are sometimes what’s best for the adults. We really want to keep it focused on what’s going to be best for the kids.”
Superintendent of Schools Gary Highsmith, Bailey and Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Education Linda Tran all took their positions at the start of the 2022-23 school year. Since then, hope is rising.
“I think (Highsmith)’s a good leader,” Stamidis said. “I think he’s going to lead Hamden schools in the right direction.”
Staff shortages and chronic absenteeism may be attacking schools across the country. In Hamden, tangible steps toward a solution are being made.