Hamilton public board hired nearly 1,000 staff ahead of school year amid unprecedented staffing challenge

Hamilton's public school board hired nearly a thousand staff ahead of the current school year amid a growing provincial teacher shortage.

As of Sept. 1, the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) had hired 929 staff since February - more than double than in the same period in each of the previous two years - in one of its largest recruitment processes, spokesperson Rob Faulkner said in an email.

The board hired 431 staff from February to September 2021 and 372 in 2020.

We have filled almost every secondary and elementary permanent classroom teacher position," Faulkner said on Friday.

It is unclear whether all classrooms had a permanent or long-term occasional teacher as of Tuesday.

Faulkner said increased enrolment, additional resources - such as the COVID-19 learning recovery fund, which allowed boards to hire more staff to reduce class sizes and support students - and the demographic" of the workforce have contributed to the board having to work harder to hire staff.

Chair Pat Daly said all classrooms at the Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board (HWCDSB) have a full-time teacher assigned, but getting there was no small feat. Both Catholic and public boards say they have accelerated" recruitment in recent months.

The last couple of years, based on my own experience, have been unlike any others," Daly said.

Unemployment rates among educators have plummeted in the last decade, reaching for early-career educators a 15-year low in 2021, according to the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT).

The college's annual survey found a four per cent unemployment rate among first-year English-language teachers in 2021 - down from 34 per cent in 2014. Similarly, one per cent of graduates in their second to fifth years of teaching were unemployed, compared to 17 per cent in 2014.

English-language teachers are again in high demand," the college said in a release. Difficult staffing challenges lie ahead for district school boards across the province."

The decreased supply is in part due to a provincial decision to increase teacher training from one to two years in 2014, slowing the influx of graduates who often spent years supply teaching before securing full-time work.

But education leaders say the pandemic has caused an already shrinking pool to dry up as teachers suffer from burnout and leave the profession.

Anecdotally, retirement and early retirement - which involves a hit to a teacher's pension - rates are higher than average," said Daryl Jerome, president of the local bargaining unit for the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation (OSSTF).

During COVID, we definitely have seen our retirement rates increase, I would say significantly," he said.

He's also seen some high school teachers pivot to other careers.

We don't usually hear of people retiring early and going into another field of work," he said.

School boards are also anticipating above-average rates of teacher absenteeism due in part to illness and isolation as COVID continues to spread.

Last January, Hamilton boards reported average staff absences of more than 1,000 a day - more than 10 per cent of staff at each board.

One of the biggest challenges we had through last year, particularly in the winter and the spring, was the number of sick calls per day," HWDSB chair Dawn Danko told The Spectator Tuesday. We were looking at numbers that we've never seen."

Danko said between 700 and 1,000 of the board's 7,000 staff were off sick every day.

That's a significant number," she said.

Daly said absenteeism rates at the Catholic board improved slightly in the spring, but remained higher than usual until the end of June. He said while he hopes the situation will improve, the board is planning for challenges ... like last winter and spring."

No one knows for certain, but it's obvious that COVID is still around," he said.

Faulkner said there is an ongoing recruitment campaign for supply teachers to ensure there are healthy pools of occasional staff." Available substitutes are not board-specific and can pick up jobs at surrounding school boards, meaning they're not always available to work in Hamilton.

The Catholic board is also recruiting occasional teachers, as well as educational assistants and custodial staff.

As of Sept. 1, the public board had 1,556 occasional teachers on its list - up 266 from 1,290 this time last year. The smaller Catholic board has about 515 on its supply list, which Daly said is likely similar to last year's number.

Last year was exhausting," Jerome said.

Teachers who were absent, sometimes for days if they continued to test positive, worried about their students, who had already suffered years of disruption, he said.

Students were also frequently absent, and teachers regularly had to catch them up.

You're wearing so many hats," he said. You need to cover all of this curriculum when all of this chaos is going on around you."

Kate McCullough is an education reporter at The Spectator. kmccullough@thespec.com