Just a couple of years ago I remember talking to someone who needed a job and saying, "If you're looking for part time work or a way you can make money while you're job searching, you should think about getting an emergency certificate and becoming a substitute teacher!""Really?" that person said. "I could do that?"
"Sure," I said to him. "School districts are ALWAYS looking for new substitute teachers!" And at the time, it was the truth. With so many jobs in this area, we sometimes struggled to have enough substitute teachers. I know we were always limited in how many teacher we could send to educational conferences NOT by the money it cost to send them but by the number of substitute teachers available to cover the classes.
Flash forward a year to January of last year. I wrote a post on this blog about the number of people who were requesting information about becoming a substitute teacher. Requests at that time had increased by 300% over the previous year!
Flash forward one more time to a couple of weeks ago, the middle of January. That's when our school district made the decision to stop accepting substitute teacher applications. There's an administrative cost on our end to process the applications, and we just didn't have the demand for the substitute teachers that this economy is supplying. Now when people show up in our offices wanting information on becoming a substitute teacher, we turn them away.
I never thought I'd see the day.
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