Hundreds of Brockton High School students spending class time in cafeteria due to substitute teacher shortage

In recent weeks, about 20 to 25 teachers at the high school have been absent every day, either due to illness or other personal or medical reasons, James Cobbs, the district’s acting superintendent, told the School Committee at a recent meeting.

But with only four permanent substitute teachers, one for each building of the high school, more than a dozen classes are daily left uncovered, district spokesperson Jess Silva-Hodges said in an interview. Students whose teachers are absent and who don’t have a substitute are told to do school work for the class period in the cafeteria, where a single staff member supervises hundreds, possibly more than 1,000, students per day.

Mary LaCivita’s 16-year-old son is a junior at Brockton High, and said one of his teachers has been absent about 30 percent, or 13 out of the 44 days, of the school year.

“The first couple times it was like, OK, whatever. And then it has become a pattern that every Thursday and/or Friday, he’s out,” LaCivita said. Because that class is her son’s last period of the day, he’s started walking home from school rather than staying to do school work in the cafeteria.

“He’s like, ‘It’s such chaos in here . . . what does anybody care if I go to the cafeteria or I walk home?’ And it turns out, no one cared. No one noticed,” said LaCivita.

Cobbs told the School Committee that based on his calculations, nearly 1,200 students at the high school are spending part of their day that should be instructional time sitting in the cafeteria. Simultaneously, teachers and administrators have seen an uptick in disciplinary, behavioral, and attendance issues with some students. There are nearly 3,700 students enrolled at the school, and the average class size for core subjects is 30 to 32 students.

“This is why we have the problem of students wandering the building and not in classrooms, because we don’t have a classroom for them to be in, and we don’t have, literally, an adult to put in the classroom in front of them,” Cobbs said.

School Committee member Tony Rodrigues said that teachers have the right to use their sick time, as laid out in the union contract, but that the district urgently needs to address the issue.

“It gets to a point where enough is enough,” Rodrigues said to the committee, saying he recently received a call from a Brockton High student who said she didn’t have a teacher for an entire school day. “She basically came to school just to sit in the cafeteria in study hall for the whole day.”

Rodrigues said he recently visited the high school and saw more than 100 students sitting in the cafeteria during class time, monitored by a single staff member.

Silva-Hodges said the district is perpetually hiring per diem substitute teachers, and also seeks to hire long-term substitutes for teachers who need to take an extended leave of absence, but in the meantime is relying on existing teachers to deal with the shortage.

“Effective yesterday, teachers at BHS started to voluntarily cover classes during their prep periods and are being paid for their coverage. . . . It’s one of the ways that our dedicated staff is stepping up to support their students in a really important way,” Silva-Hodges said.

The district is also considering giving teachers at other schools in the district the opportunity to fill in for a class at the high school that doesn’t have a substitute.

“Everything’s on the table. We’re trying really hard to figure out how to better serve our kids given the current situation,” said Silva-Hodges.

Jose Duarte, the acting principal at Brockton High, told committee members he’s had an all-staff meeting to address attendance and accountability, and he’s optimistic teacher attendance rates will improve. However, Duarte said he is prepared to begin having individual conversations with teachers who have particularly high absence rates.

“We all get sick, we all have personal obligations, but there’s patterns and trends,” Duarte said.

Both he and Cobbs noted they’re only having attendance issues with a fraction of their staff, and some have legitimate medical reasons.

“We have a great cadre of teachers here that come here, they’re dedicated, committed to the students, and they do what they’re supposed to, they come to work every day,” said Cobbs. “It’s not everybody in one basket.”

But the substitute shortage complicates existing teacher vacancies.

The school has nine unfilled teacher positions for core instructional areas, Silva-Hodges said. However, according to the district’s hiring website, the number of vacancies the district is trying to fill at the high school is closer to 25 when including positions like the principal, associate principal, special needs teachers, and automotive technology instructors, among others.

The district cut 42 staff positions at Brockton High in the spring due to budget deficits, though several of the positions were ultimately reinstated, according to Silva-Hodges.

Hiring teachers two months into the school year, though, can be especially challenging, since most accept their positions well before the school year starts.

“We need to figure out an aggressive plan to recruit so that we don’t have to count on these measures in order to cover classes on a permanent basis,” said Kimberly Gibson, president of the Brockton Education Association. “But those teachers, they’re giving up their prep periods, they’re taking on more responsibility, having to take more work home with them.”

Silva-Hodges said the district’s human resources department is also reaching out to retirees and those who have left the district who might want to return.

“It’s certainly not for lack of effort,” said Silva-Hodges. “We have some irons in the fire and we’re really, really hopeful that that issue will be addressed very soon, because that’s what our kids and our staff at the high school in particular deserve.”

Niki Griswold can be reached at niki.griswold@globe.com. Follow her @nikigriswold.