More teachers needed for Phila. schools

Seven weeks into the school year, the Philadelphia School District still has 112 classroom teaching vacancies - 40 more than this time last year.

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers says the district, which currently has 10,405 classroom teaching positions, should have acted earlier to fill the jobs and asserts that the education of several thousand students is being hindered as a result of not having a permanent teacher.

"It's child abuse, really," union vice president Arlene Kempin said Wednesday, standing outside the School Reform Commission meeting.

Union president Jerry Jordan said this week that the lack of a permanent teacher in classrooms would affect student performance on standardized tests, which are used to judge schools and the district.

The cash-strapped district, he said, delayed hiring to save money - an allegation district officials flatly denied.

Shawn Crowder, the district's senior vice president of human resources, said the larger number of vacancies was caused largely by the commission's decision last spring to add 130 teaching positions back into the budget. The commission directed the administration in August to use the extra positions to reduce class sizes in lower grades, as well as the number of split classes enrolling students in two grades. The administration reported this week that both had been accomplished.

But the district needed to wait until the last week of September to see where the new teachers to be hired were most needed, Crowder said.

"We didn't know who would need to be shifted into these positions," she said. "Contractually, we couldn't hire any new teachers until we assigned existing teachers."

Crowder said the delay was not done to save money.

"There's no way from an HR perspective that we even tried to slow down hiring. We were under the gun by the SRC to get this done," she said. "We paid overtime for folks to come in on the weekend."

The district saved $3.5 million by shifting teachers based on enrollment needs, a process known as leveling. But the savings were not the result of the delay, but rather the reorganizing that put more teachers where enrollments were greatest, district officials asserted.

Also fueling the need for more teachers were resignations. The district had 122 teacher resignations since the start of the school year, down from 152 this time last year, Crowder said.

Union officials were skeptical of the district's response.

"It doesn't all add up to me," Jordan said. "Those positions could have been advertised and filled sooner."

Kempin asserted that the district actually had 160 classroom-teaching vacancies as of Wednesday and 20 speech-teacher openings. Crowder said that the speech-teacher number was right but that the other number was outdated.

Crowder countered that the district had qualified substitutes covering the classroom vacancies, and that the district was hiring 30 to 50 teachers a week. It's more difficult to hire this time of year than in the summer because many applicants have accepted jobs elsewhere, she said.

Vacancies continue to be most prevalent in special education, math, some sciences, and foreign languages, she said.

Last year at this time, the district had 72 teaching vacancies among its 10,826 classroom teaching positions.