Allegheny Valley School District searching for substitute teachers, custodians

Like many businesses around the Alle-Kiski Valley, the Allegheny Valley School District needs employees.

Specifically, substitute teachers and custodians, a problem the school board discussed at its agenda meeting Tuesday.

“We are in a position where we need substitutes,” Superintendent Patrick Graczyk told the board.

He said the problem was underscored recently when 11 teachers were off work on one day and the administration had only one substitute to call in.

He said, fortunately, the staff managed to work around the shortfall but said the problem of not having enough substitutes remains.

“Right now, we have one consistent (substitute) we can rely on at the elementary and one consistent person at the junior-senior high,” Graczyk said.

He said offering more money and stability could increase the number of substitute teachers interested in working at Allegheny Valley. Money to do that is available, he said, through the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion federal program designed to help the country recover from the devastating effects of the covid-19 pandemic on American life and the economy.

Hamsini Rajgopal, the district’s director of finance and business operations, told the board the district received $1.6 million from the plan.

Graczyk said the administration wants to move forward with hiring building substitutes for both the Acmetonia Elementary School and Springdale Junior-Senior High School to help mitigate the problem.

In that scenario, a substitute would come to work at each building every day and fill in as needed.

Board member Joelle McFarland asked what the building substitutes would do in the event that none of the teaching staff calls off.

Graczyk said in that case, the substitute could take over a class to allow the regular teacher to spend time dealing with “learning loss” among students. He said the term is what the federal government uses to describe the adverse effects on a child’s education due to the pandemic.

“For learning loss, it’s a very broad umbrella that a lot of things fit under,” Graczyk said.

Everything from a student’s grade in a subject dropping from an A to a B or C, to a parent’s belief that his or her child is having emotional difficulties, could be considered learning loss.

The major part of dealing with learning loss is identifying how they have been affected, he said. It is a situation where the district faces a paradox in trying to move students forward in their education while at the same time trying to get them to where they should be now in the process.

“We are trying to get the students what they need and in an equitable way,” Graczyk said.

Referring to the substitute problem, he told McFarland, “We’re in a position where we want to provide more of the remediation and interventions but we’re faced with real life and we are stymied.”

According to Graczyk, other districts are having similar problems.

He said the district was fortunate to obtain the services of two interns who have teaching degrees and are working toward master’s degrees as reading specialists. They will help with students who have regressed in their reading abilities because of the disruption caused by covid. Both are being paid with federal funds.

As for the issue of custodians, Rajgopal told the board the district published advertisements seeking candidates for custodial positions but yielded no applicants.

That is why the administration is recommending the board approve an addendum to an agreement with Precision Human Resource Solutions, a staffing company the district has used in the past. Under the addendum, the district would pay $24 an hour for substitute custodians and $26 an hour for substitute maintenance workers.

That raised a concern from board member Stephen Puskar, who said he would like to know how much of that rate the worker actually receives.

“We’re looking at hiring subs at almost double or maybe one-and-a-half times what our full-time employees are making,” Puskar said.

He said that could create an issue with those employees who are members of a union.

Board member Antonio Pollino said the rate for Precision seems “extremely high.” He asked if the administration had contacted other staffing companies and Graczyk said it had not.

Pollino said it seems more prudent to get prices from other companies before making a decision.

Graczyk said the administration will do that and also find out how much of the Precision rate the workers actually receive.