Aliyya Swaby Photo
Heller tries to plan chemo around school vacations.
Jonathan Heller has taken 15 days off from teaching at Career High School this year to get chemotherapy for stage IV colon cancer — meaning he is considered “chronically absent” according to the district.
Heller was one of several teachers who shared their experiences with taking sick days and finding substitute teachers, responding to this article on how the district is updating its policy on electronically tracking teacher attendance.
More than 100 teachers have missed enough days to be considered “chronically absent,” meaning they have a 10 percent absence rate or higher.
Teachers union President Dave Cicarella told the Board of Education at the latest meeting that teachers were upset after receiving a letter from district officials Jan. 8 reminding them to show up to school every day and asking them to report any absences using an electronic program called AESOP, which manages attendance and substitute teachers.
(Click here to read the letter.)
Though the letter explained that school leaders would not fault teachers for missing class due to extenuating circumstances, Cicarella said teachers felt “scapegoated,” especially since administrators and central office staff were not included in the “attendance matters” push.
Superintendent Garth Harries told the Independent the letter was addressing a minority of teachers who need to be more conscientious about how they use their sick days. The average attendance rate among teachers is about 95 percent.
“My orientation and emphasis is on those teacher who abuse sick time in ways that compromise the professional integrity of the whole workforce,” he said. “We reviewed the letter multiple times with the union and tried to soften the language as best as possible.”
He said he is in the process of working with the administrators union to develop a “clear system of reporting” administrator absences.
“What we would like to see happen is everyone in the district doing attendance on AESOP” online, including principals and central office staff, Harries said.
“The vast majority of our staff are professional, are there every day. We need to have programs in place so that if folks are abusing standards of attendance and absences, we have the ability to identify it and take action on it.”.
Planning Sick Days
Teachers interviewed said taking sick days requires a lot of work making arrangements and planning lessons for students ahead of time.
Since being diagnosed in August, Heller has had to carefully plan his chemotherapy around the three different business and marketing classes he teaches several times a week. He said he tries to schedule the appointments on half days of school, when students have midterms or close to school holidays.
He alternates between days teaching three classes and days teaching two classes. He said he usually took off for chemo on the days when he was teaching fewer classes.
Career High School has one intern and one full-time substitute who support teachers and take over classes when necessary. But when Heller needed the intern, the intern was covering for another teacher. And there was no guarantee that the full-time substitute would be assigned to his classes either.
“If I needed just two classes covered one day, he could be assigned to someone with three or four” classes, Heller said.
And he would never be able to trust the sub to take over his curriculum. “Is he going to deliver a lesson? No,” Heller said.
Substitutes from outside of the building have proven similarly underwhelming in performance in the classroom, he said. New Haven has the lowest pay rate among local cities for substitute teachers.
“You get what you pay for,” Heller said. Substitutes are “just babysitters.” Though he leaves detailed instructions for subs when he misses class for medical appointments, he said, his students have told him stories of subs making phone calls during class instead of supervising them.
He was absent for a CAT scan one day last week and left projects for students in each of the classes he was scheduled to teach. The seniors he teaches are responsible and “understanding,” he said. Some of them “know someone who’s gone through chemo and cancer.”
Heller knows some teachers who “take full advantage of all the days afforded them,” whether or not they are physically ill: “I don’t agree with them.” Even so, he said, it is “unfair to lump everyone in the same group” when approaching teachers about attendance.
Hillhouse High School civics teacher Beth Wolak said she puts together three times as much work when preparing for a substitute to take over her class.
“In my case, that work is done. It’s piled up. The kids come in to make sure you got their work,” she said. “This is done by every teacher who has a sub and is diligent about it. I don’t know anyone who’s left the sub with nothing there.”
Though some staff do abuse their sick days, most get “stressed” when they have to take time off, she said.
Wolak has taken at least seven sick days since the beginning of the school year, to accompany her husband to doctor’s appointments for his heart condition. She logs the days on AESOP. She said she would not talk with her principal about the absences unless she were going to take more than three days at a time.
Last year, she applied and received medical leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act when she had to stay home with her husband after his surgery.
She teaches seniors, who often text and call her when she is away from the classroom, and let her know how the class went.
Stories, Not Data
McTague: Sometimes teachers need a mental health day.
School atmosphere and culture can affect whether teachers are able to be present in the classroom.
Lincoln-Bassett teacher Jenna McDermit took at least five sick days when she started her first job in the district at DOMUS Academy through Teach For America. A “turnaround” school managed by a not-for-profit social services agency, DOMUS serves students with behavioral or social problems who did not succeed in traditional school settings.
McDermit was one of six new teachers in 2010 with no experience in the profession, taking over in mid-October for a teacher who had quit. She drove to New Haven from Texas one day and started teaching the next day, with no prior knowledge of the district.
“We did so poorly by those students,” she said. “We didn’t know how to teach or talk to the kids, whose circumstances were so high stakes. The school was an abysmal place.” Administrators created an atmosphere that humiliated and manipulated teachers — especially women, McDermit said.
“Lots of times I would wake up in the morning and feel degraded from so many different angles,” she said. Eventually, she told TFA about her experiences and the organization moved her to teach at an Achievement First charter school the next year.
Since then, at Achievement First and now at Lincoln-Basset, McDermit said her attendance record has been “excellent,” since she hasn’t dreaded going to work. This week, she had to call in sick because of a bad cold. “I felt like I missed out on a nice time with my students,” she said.
Superintendent Harries said the district’s letter was intended to target teachers who take unnecessary “quote unquote mental health days.”
McDermit said she is torn on whether a mental health day is a valid reason to take a sick day. When she worked for Achievement First, she knew a teacher who was stressed out because she couldn’t arrange to pay her student loans or manage her finances during school hours. She took a sick day and took care of that. “To me, that seems like a very legit thing to do. But other teachers in the school and administration came down pretty hard on her,” she said.
But if teachers are taking time off regularly because they are feeling degraded by their administrators or worn down by the school culture, “the school and administration needs to take a serious look in the mirror,” McDermit said. “The school environment needs to change so teachers don’t feel this.”
Career High School science teacher Terence McTague said he has been absent two or three days this academic year. “One of them was probably a mental health day,” he said. Though that is not a common reason for taking a sick day among teachers he knows, “that’s going to happen when teachers are working and relied upon but don’t necessarily have the supports they need. Teachers’ working conditions are the students’ learning conditions.”
By early January, Career had about seven teachers considered chronically absent, according to district records.
That’s more than usual, said Career teacher Rosa Ayala. A few of her peers have had extenuating circumstances, including cancer and sick family members.
Ayala missed two days of school, one of which was to participate in her sister’s wedding. She prepared assignments for her students that they “didn’t need a teacher to complete.”
Attendance is a “touchy” subject, she said. “We do have our entitled sick time.” She said she supports her colleagues, but also agrees that teachers should be in the classroom as much as possible.
McTague said it’s important to go past the statistics to the anecdotes behind them, to determine why teachers are calling out sick.
“When we boil it down to these numbers and data points, someone sees a lazy teacher or the stereotypical bad teacher, where I see and the kids see a hero coming to work through a challenging time,” he said.
Better Subs
Teachers suggested more training, higher pay and higher expectations as potential solutions to raising the quality of substitutes who take over when they need to be out of the building.
Fair Haven School second-grade bilingual teacher Monica Bunton started as a long-term substitute teacher there in 2011 before being hired as a full-time teacher.
Substitute teachers are paid $62.40 per day in New Haven, compared to $70 to $82 in nearby districts. Finding a qualified substitute teacher is difficult, Bunton said.
Subs are coordinated through the AESOP online program; they can log on and choose they school they want to work at each day. That makes it harder for a “principal and substitute to work together and say, ‘This works for us. You’re a good fit for our school.’ And for the sub to say, ‘This is a good fit for me,’” Bunton said.
By the time Bunton started teaching at Fair Haven full-time, she had gotten to know the students, teachers and school culture, while taking over the classroom of a teacher who was out on maternity leave.
“You lose that when you don’t have the ability as a sub to stay in one school,” she said.