Amid Shortage, Teachers Cite Disrespect

As the city’s public school district struggles to fill classrooms with permanent teachers, veteran local educators spoke out about feeling disrespected and underappreciated six weeks into a school year increasingly defined by a teacher shortage.

Those two New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) educators are Kirsten Hopes-McFadden, an eighth-grade social studies teacher at Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS), and Ashley Stockton, a sixth-grade English teacher at Wexler Grant School. 

Hopes-McFadden and Stockton spoke with the Independent in separate interviews to share their perspectives on the school year so far. Stockton also sent an email Friday night to Board of Education members, voicing similar concerns to those she expressed in her interview with the Independent.

While neither teacher claimed to speak for anyone other than themselves, their experiences and criticisms resonate with a problem seen in public school classrooms around the state and country this school year: That is, a dearth of full-time employed teachers, and the resulting detrimental impacts on student learning and on workplace morale among educator colleagues trying to stick it out.

Hopes-McFadden has been teaching at ESUMS for 12 years and in New Haven for a total of 25 years. Stockton has been teaching for 21 years. 

The two both expressed feelings of disrespect from their superiors, who they say don’t recognize just how heavy their workloads have become, and who don’t show them that they are appreciated for their dedication to New Haven. Both Stockton and Hopes-McFadden said these issues correspond to the ongoing national teacher shortage. In her email to the Board of Education, Stockton also tied these and related concerns to the teachers’ union contract.

“If the [Board of Education] does not return to the negotiating table and settle a fair contract with the NHPS teachers, this will only be the beginning of the exodus of educators from New Haven,” Stockton wrote to the ed board members. ​“The mistreatment and mismanagement have caused the current state of staffing. The city and school leadership had time to address the teacher shortage and no action was taken. Our kids are paying the price. They have limited course selections, increased class size, don’t have teachers, are not receiving an education, and some days aren’t even allowed to remain in school due to inadequate staffing. 

“The facts I shared are just things I know off the top of my head from my own experiences as a parent and a teacher. Do the right thing and return to negotiations. Without fair working conditions teachers will continue to leave. Without teachers our schools will collapse. Members of this Board can prevent this from happening by standing up for our teachers and kids.”

In response to a request for comment for this article, NHPS spokesperson Justin Harmon said that the district currently has around 80 teacher vacancies. 

“We recognize that teachers feel the strain of the vacancies in their midst. We are grateful to our teachers for their ongoing commitment to serving the needs of our students, and we are working hard to address the need for more teachers,” Harmon wrote in his email comment.

“The staff shortage we are experiencing throughout the district is a nationwide problem,” he continued. ​“We are hiring teachers as quickly as we can, but we continue to lose teachers. We are particularly challenged by the fact that surrounding districts can often pay teachers better than we can.”

Asked about steps NHPS has taken to address the local public school teacher shortage, Harmon said the district has reinstituted ​“a retention bonus that was paid this summer and will be paid again next spring. We have hired teachers who are in the process of completing teaching certificates and master’s degrees. To help with coverage, we worked out an arrangement with the teachers’ union whereby we are paying extra to teachers who are willing to teach classes during what would otherwise be prep time. We will continue to make the case for fully funding the school district budget at the city and state levels so that we can improve teacher salaries and make them more competitive in the market.”

Reached for comment over the weekend, Board of Education member Darnell Goldson and teachers’ union President Leslie Blatteau said that the critiques raised by Stockton and Hopes-McFadden are not unique to these two teachers.

“It’s acute and serious at the middle and high school levels,” Blatteau said about NHPS’s teacher shortage. ​“But all teachers are feeling that exhaustion and demoralization that we usually don’t feel until mid-winter.” (See below for more on Blatteau’s take on this issue.)

“What am I hearing from students and teachers?” Goldson asked in response to an email request for comment for this article. ​“A lot unfortunately. I have received calls and emails from parents who are extremely concerned about the lack of certified teachers. I have heard stories of students being herded together in auditoriums because of the lack of teaching staff. Parents have voiced concern regarding the lack of advanced classes as well as overcrowded classes.”

He criticized the NHPS administration’s approach to contract negotiations with the teachers’ union, saying that it will ​“lead to more teachers abandoning our system which already has a chronic shortage. The administrators and lawyers negotiating for us do not have those issues, they get paid whether they negotiate or send it to arbitration. They win. Our students and families lose. The teachers have organized a campaign to bring the administration back to the table, we have received dozens of emails from them demanding so.”

“I am very concerned for our future,” Goldson concluded. ​“The combination of low pay and extra responsibilities for teachers is leading to even higher vacancies. On top of that the federal and state money will be drying up soon, and we will return to continued budget deficits. We are speeding towards a cliff, and no one seems to be driving the bus.”

"Job Responsibilities Have Increased Exponentially"

In addition to teaching at Wexler Grant, Stockton is a parent of two NHPS students. 

Her teenage son attends Wilbur Cross High School. She said that since the start of the school year, he has been sent home early multiple times because his classes don’t have a teacher or substitute to cover them. 

On Friday, she said, all of Wilbur Cross was dismissed at around noon due to multiple large fights throughout the building. 

“The district’s management is having an unprecedented impact on the kids and us teachers,” she said. 

Stockton said that her son’s math teacher recently resigned, leaving him without a math class when no substitute is available.

Stockton detailed some of her concerns as a NHPS parent in her Friday email to the Board of Education.

“Today students at Wilbur Cross were sent home and the school was closed due to the school’s inability to ensure a safe and secure environment,” she wrote.

She continued: ​“This school year students at Wilbur Cross have regularly been sent home early due to no teacher being present, no substitute being present, and no adult supervision. The city has regularly failed to provide students their education and has not even provided them a safe and supervised environment. Students have been marked present for class and then directed to go home because there is no teacher.”

As for her experience as a NHPS teacher, Stockton told the Independent that, for the second year in a row, she was ​“involuntarily transferred” to teach a completely different grade level. This year she was transferred from kindergarten to sixth grade the day before the first day of school. She is the fourth sixth-grade teacher to come in the last four years, she said.

Stockton said she was one of four local educators to be transferred at the last minute with no advance notice. Since then, two of those teachers have resigned, she said.

“We told them, ​‘This is going to have a worse effect,’ ” she recalled telling district leaders. “ ​‘If you’re doing this, you completely do not understand what the work of teaching is like.’ ” 

Stockton said she had spent several unpaid hours and her own money setting up her kindergarten classroom leading up to the start of the year. Instead of teaching four- and five-year-olds as she prepared for over the summer, Stockton is now teaching 12-year-olds. 

As a result of Stockton’s transfer and the transfer of a first-grade teacher also at Wexler, Stockton said, the school’s kindergarten and first-grade classes have doubled in size.

Last year, Stockton said, the school’s kindergarten and first-grade classes had 10 to 12 students. The transfers now make it so there is only one kindergarten class and one first grade class, each with at least 20 students. 

She said the teacher shortage has also caused classroom paraprofessionals to be pulled from their classes to substitute throughout the building. 

“I’ve never seen such little regard for the kids, for the community, for stability, for safety, for morale,” Stockton said.

Stockton also argued that the increasing number of resignations are not just about teachers seeking a higher salary. ​“It’s working conditions, treatment, disrespect, it’s management,” she said. ​“There’s a lot that could have been corrected without a dime.”

Stockton relayed these same experiences and concerns to the Board of Education members in her Friday email.

“The day before school began the superintendent claimed it was within her right to involuntarily transfer 4 teachers, including me. Of the teachers she did this to, 2 have resigned from NHPS and are now teaching in neighboring districts, 1 has not returned to teaching, and 1 transferred to another school,” she wrote. ​“100% of the teachers did not accept the involuntary transfer the superintendent claims she has the authority to make; 75% of them are not teaching in New Haven.”

She continued: ​“Since the school year began 6 weeks ago, 3 teachers have resigned from Wexler Grant. The vacancies created by their resignations are now in addition to the multiple vacancies that already existed in the school. Children in 8th grade are being ​‘taught’ by the same uncertified substitute teacher they have had for 3 out of the last 4 years of school.”

When speaking with the Independent on Friday, Stockton said, ​“I’ve never felt so unvalued and disrespected and so desperately worried for our kids. I don’t think it’s a surprise why we’re here.”

Stockton said the ​“rug was pulled out from under us after three hard years,” referring to the shift to remote learning during the pandemic and the teacher pay freeze. That pay freeze in 2020 approved an amendment to the teachers’ contracts that put off a pay bump planned for that year in exchange for three years of protection from layoffs, involuntary transfers and rising medical costs.

“People didn’t want to leave but had to to claim back their self worth,” Stockton told this reporter.

She said that she feels as though she has had four different jobs over the past four years: She has had to bounce around from teaching remote to in-person, from teaching fifth-grade to kindergarten to sixth-grade.

“The job responsibilities have increased exponentially. Teaching is not the same as it was 20 years ago,” she said.

"It Feels Demoralizing"

Hopes-McFadden said her concerns with disrespect were exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“I feel like the district just doesn’t care or get it,” she said. 

She said due to the staff shortage her school’s world languages department no longer has designated rooms for their classes and instead has provided teachers with carts to travel to temporary classrooms throughout the day. She said that decision was announced to teachers like Hopes-McFadden the day before the first day of the school year. 

What once was the French classroom has since been reassigned as a classroom for the school’s newest full-time social studies teacher, Hopes-McFadden said. 

Since the start of the school year, Hopes-McFadden has been sharing her classroom with the French teacher, who teaches during her off periods. The use of her classroom by other educators leaves her little alone time to prep or have lunch, she said. 

Hopes-McFadden added that completing a full class lesson is not always possible for her because she has had to spend class time helping students struggling to read. She attributed this to the district’s low reading scores last school year. (Click here to read about the district’s new plan to improve those scores.)

As a building steward for the NHPS teachers’ union, Hopes-McFadden said, she has been tasked more often with reminding her colleagues of their contractual rights, like an unimpeded 45-minute prep time and 30-minute lunch period.

She said the district’s top-down decision making approach is one of the main causes for teachers leaving the district, along with non-competitive salaries. 

“It’s like little slices of disrespect,” she said.

She said ESUMS has a high turnover rate with teachers because of a ​“hostile” work environment between educators and the administration. 

On top of dealing with borrowed classrooms and having to give constant reminders to her colleagues about their contractual rights to a 45-minute prep time, Hopes-McFadden said, teachers are dealing with unpunished behavioral issues with the students. 

“We make referrals for students then don’t ever know what happens because they don’t tell us,” she said. 

She said when teachers raise concerns about student behavior, consequences are not strict enough to correct those behaviors. 

“It feels demoralizing,” Hopes-McFadden said about her school year so far. ​“Then they ask you to do one more thing that turns into a thousand more things without the pay.” 

“This Is Fixable”

In a weekend phone interview with the Independent, teachers union President Leslie Blatteau said that she’s heard similar concerns to those raised by Stockton and Hopes-McFadden from plenty of other NHPS educators so far this school year.

She said veteran educators who have shown a dedication and love for teaching in New Haven have not been ​“able to do our jobs that we’re hired to do” for years now.

Blatteau described a teacher’s job as building relationships and providing high quality instruction. Instead of being able to do this, teachers are ​“doing patch work” due to a lack of routine and normalcy, she said. 

“It’s very, very hard to focus on your work when you can’t rely on a steady routine because everyday is just another attempt to plug holes in the boat that’s sinking,” she said. 

Citing a few ways to restore stability, Blatteau suggested that the district assign building-specific substitutes to schools in need, to help with stability by having subs become familiar with a specific school’s culture and students. She also suggested the district look into using federal pandemic-relief funds to pay substitutes more.

She added that the district could increase its outreach to local colleges and universities to seek interns for school support staff and long-term substitutes. 

“The more ways we build that teacher pipeline allow us to work on restoring routine,” she said. 

She recalled teachers telling her that their schools are working with a ​“skeleton crew” due to so many vacancies.

This Tuesday, the Board of Education is expected to meet and discuss the possible approval of a teacher sign-on bonus initiative, proposed by the superintendent. 

Blatteau said she hopes to see the district also propose teacher-retention focused efforts to honor experienced veteran educators who remain with the district, in addition to the Retention and Recruitment Incentive Plan approved this past May. 

“It feels disrespectful to not recognize that our teachers have sacrificed in their commitment to New Haven,” she said. 

She suggested the district provide teachers, students, and the community with a one-year plan detailing its efforts to address the teacher shortage.

​“We look to leaders to say, ​‘Yes we can fix this,’ not that nothing can be done,” she said. 

Teachers must be supported by their supervisors and the district, listened to, and respected, Blatteau said.

​“I think there are some administrators that have forgotten what it’s like to be a teacher in the classroom, especially in 2022,” she said. ​“Student behavior is not what we’re used to and we know it’s because their needs are not met.” 

She added that due to the pandemic some student guardians are ​“out of practice of being in kids’ schools” and suggested the district address that through organizing regular school planning and management team (SPMT) and student and staff support team (SSST) meetings. 

“This is a beautiful profession and there’s so many that have been doing good work and so many of us that aren’t going anywhere,” she said. ​“That needs to not only be acknowledged but considered in a plan to fix this, because this is fixable.” 

Thomas Breen contributed to this report.