Its a growing trend among schools now to outsource their subs to temp service agencies and our district has announced they will start next year. They say it has to do with the new Obamacare policies.
What this means for the subs is they will get less pay since the temp services will get their cut and the schools will get less quality subs since who would sub in a classroom of wild kids for less money than they were getting before? Heck they already have a shortage of substitutes and often they cannot get any and the schools have to use fill ins or send the kids to the library or something.
I believe there are legal requirements to provide health coverage for workers who work more than x number of hours. A substitute teacher who is good at the job could be used often enough to pass this number of hours, and then the school district would have to provide health coverage.
But by hiring a compqny to provide the substitute hours, they aren’t paying a person, so that person can’t be an employee of the school district, so they aren’t required to provide health coverage.
Our school district obtains substitutes this way through a regional school cooperative (BOCES in NY).
Advantage for the district is they don’t need to maintain extensive lists of substitutes and spend the time calling them all every day. A teacher is going to be out, they go to the web site, request the sub, eligible subs are notified, one of them accepts.
Advantage for the subs - instead of having to be on lists at multiple schools they can simply register with one place and be called for openings at any of the participating schools. No idea how the rate compares but there is a benefit to the substitutes in it’s easier to work more.
Seems to me like we should be finding schools enough that they can provide basic benefits to their employees. Given that pre-Obamacare it was risky and sometimes impossible to get individual health coverage, we were asking our children’s teachers to gamble with their finances and their lives for the provider of the occasional $120 a day.
I’m curious if substitute teachers are generally expected to teach. In my school career I never had a substitute actually teach anything. They were just a warm body in the room making sure that nobody was doing anything stupid.
I believe that the ultimate goal is to drive every student out of the public school system and into charter schools, where they can be indoctrinated to the wonders of jebus and kept totally devoid of critical-thinking skills, so Fox has a new generation of viewers and the GOP a new generation of mindless drones.
But if the sub is good, then the same rule applies except the temp service has to provide healthcare coverage, and they are going to pass that along to the school system, no?
??
Pepper Mill works many hours as a substitute, but they don’t offer health care.
Does this vary by state or something?
And it’s not clear how this would work. Maybe the school figures it doesn’t have to pay healthcare for the teachers if hired through a third party, but then surely the third party hiring the teachers would have to provide health care if the teacher worked the same number of hours.
Of course, the agency could use more teachers so that none of them works the minimum for health coverage. But the school could do that, itself, without bringing a third party into it.
The only way your scenario makes sense is if hiring agencies and schools have different requirements for providing healthcare.
I had one sub for practically an entire year due to the regular teacher being out for maternity leave. 'Course, this particular sub was one of the school’s regulars taking on more classes.
If the requisite number of hours is reached, and healthcare coverage has to be provided, it’s still going to be paid for eventually by the end user, which is the school district. The only difference now is that there’s a temp agency taking a cut out of the middle.
Here’s a story about the system being put in place in Roanoke, Virginia, and it’s pretty vague about exactly how the savings are supposed to work:
It seems like all that’s happening here is shifting the costs within the system. It doesn’t seem like the costs themselves are really going to change very much.
This story about Allentown, PA, mentions the healthcare issue, but their outsourcing plan appears to be more focused on the fact that they have had trouble finding enough subs, and need the outside resource in order to increase the pool of available labor.
Another story from Jersey City, NJ, focuses mainly on the lack of qualified substitutes, and it doesn’t seem like the new system will save the city much money. In fact, costs might actually go up:
The Jersey story makes no reference to healthcare issues. In a couple of these linked stories, critics argue that the main motivation behind all this is to privatize as much of the public school system as possible. The first and third stories suggest that there could be some “economies of scale” factor going on here, whereby having the agency do things like timesheets, tracking, reporting, etc., takes the burden for that stuff off the district itself.
Yes. The only possible way this makes sense is if the school system has a very expensive healthcare program that far exceeds the mandated coverage (either in the coverage itself or in the pecentage of premiums paid by the school district). Then it could be less expensive for the temp agency to provide the coverage, even though the school system is paying in the end.
Are there any competency standards for subs nowadays? Someone mentioned to me a while back that the only real requirements for being a sub in my jurisdiction were a high school diploma and passing a background check. You don’t actually have to know any of the material being taught or how to teach it.
Around these parts, charter schools are part of the public school system…no ‘jebus teaching’ allowed; perhaps you meant to say ‘private schools’ (which still would be a sweeping generalization, but slightly less incorrect)?
As a couple of my linked articles, above, suggest, the biggest concern is for subs who have to fill in for extended periods.
In one of the articles, one interviewee said that it might be OK to have a warm body to act as a sort of babysitter if the teacher is only out for a day, but if the teacher is out for longer than that, you need someone who is qualified and competent to keep the students on track with their learning. In fact, a couple of the districts referred to in those articles say they are outsourcing subs precisely because they don’t have enough subs who are properly accredited.
It probably depends on the area. I teach university in San Diego County, and i’ve done some work with local teachers, and with the County Office of Education, and in this area plenty of good teachers were laid off during the recession. Some of them have been rehired, but not all, and there are actually quite a few outstanding teachers who are subbing because they can’t find permanent work. This situation is exacerbated, in some cases, by agreements with teachers’ unions that require layoffs to be on a last-hired, first-fired basis.
I’m a supporter of unions, and i’m a member of one myself, but seniority rules sometimes have problematic consequences. A few years ago, i was doing consulting work for the San Diego County Office on a federally-funded program to improve the teaching of US history in county schools. I worked with a teacher who won a county-wide and a statewide teaching award, and is an incredibly committed and conscientious teacher, and she got pink-slipped during the recession because of seniority rules. It’s pretty depressing to see excellent teachers lose their jobs like that.
Right. But, as the temp services aren’t going to altruistically pay for health benefits out of their own pockets, the cost of those health benefits would presumably be passed along to the school hiring the temps.
It depends on the school district and the temp agency involved. The employer mandate to provide health insurance will only apply to employers that employ more than 100 full-time equivalent employees, starting on January 1, 2015 and those that employ more than 50 full-time equivalent employees starting January 1, 2016. If the school district already has more than 100 (or 50) full-time equivalent employees (which most districts surely have) and the Temp agency has less than 100 (or 50) full-time equivalents, then it would surely make sense for the school to use the agency, as that way neither party would be liable to offer health insurance for the temp workers that average over 30 hours per week or 130 per month. Also remember that there are exceptions for the Employer Mandate for certain seasonal employers, so depending on the size of the temp agency and the type and number of hours that their temps usually work per week, they might be able to avoid the employer mandate altogether for all of their employees.
Another savings cost would be the bookkeeping requirements for the school - they would have to track the number of hours both weekly and monthly (one of the ways to calculate Full-time equivalent employees for purposes of the Employer Mandate is if the employee works more than 130 hours per month) for every substitute teacher and then average out those hours for each substitute over the year. They would have to do this every year to determine which substitutes they are required to offer insurance to and which ones they are not. For certain workers, it is possible that they might meet the requirements one year so that the school is required to offer them insurance, and then the next year they average 2 hours per week less (to put them below the requirements) and the school could drop them from the insurance coverage and tell them to go get a policy on the exchanges or individual marketplace. The paperwork and bookkeeping for the school district is going to be a headache because of the new requirements regardless, but shifting the burden for their substitute teachers off to a temp agency would likely lessen their administrative costs regardless as to whether the temp agency is required to offer coverage and shifts that burden to the school.
