Sticky Issues
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Sticky Issues Archive >
In this section, principals tell how they handled a challenging situation, how some policy that was in place actually worked, and the lessons learned from dealing with these Sticky Issues. Send your stories to principal@osu.edu. Please indicate if we may use your name in the “contributor” credits.
No Subs!
Nothing upsets the academic flow of school as much as the day when you receive early calls or you call your automated system to find that one or more teachers are absent. Even worse is the staff emergency that necessitates you calling for a substitute late. We all also know the mornings that the flu bug has hit every school and there are just not enough substitutes to go around. In the past it was bedlam in our building as either a staff member not attached to a classroom or I would go and attempt to take lunch count and reassign students to other rooms for the day. Most teachers do excellent preparation for substitutes, especially when they know they are going to be absent, but occasionally the absent teacher called out on an emergency has not left adequate preparation for the class.
We came together as a team and brainstormed ways to overcome this inevitable glitch in the daily flow of school. The primary idea we came up with was for each teacher to predivide his or her class list. Teachers know their own students the best. They know which students should be placed with which students. They also know which students know other teachers and which teachers with whom students will do well. So with the predetermined lists, teachers buddied up with each other to be the planned “substitute” for each other. Teachers even planned an option 2 so that if the first named teacher was also absent, there was a second planned division of students. This planning became so routine, that when students came in and became aware that their teacher or a substitute was not in the room, they would start gathering their things and saying, “I have to go to Mrs. Smith’s today!”
What I learned from this experience is that all of our thinking is better than just my own thinking. I learned that when you have a problem you identify the problem, identify what you want to happen and then develop a plan to make it happen!
