TUSD braces for new school year with significant staffing shortages

With about two weeks until students’ first day back to school, Tucson Unified School District faces significant staffing shortages in some departments.

Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo said the deepest shortages are among middle and high school math educators, special education teachers and bus drivers.

“We are continuing to hire on a daily basis. I do see us getting more teachers, although it’s more of a trickle now,” Trujillo said Wednesday.

“As we stand here on July 20, I’m very realistic about the inevitable likelihood that we’re going to be starting school with basically the same number of vacancies that we have now,” he said.

Overall, Trujillo said, the district has a workforce of about 2,750 teachers and is facing 126 teacher vacancies.

Earlier this month, TUSD administrators informed governing board members that the district faced up to 24 math teacher vacancies in middle and high schools. As of Wednesday, Trujillo said that number looked the same.

The district also has more than 50 vacancies each for bus drivers and exceptional education teachers, a program that ensures proper services and education for students with disabilities.

Trujillo noted that the bus driver vacancies are an improvement from the approximately 90 vacancies TUSD faced at the start of last school year. Still, he said the district is far from hiring its ideal 200 drivers to restore all bus routes that it offered in pre-pandemic years.

TUSD notified parents of this year’s established bus routes to allow them to make the necessary plans for their children’s transportation, to avoid making the same mistake as last year, he said, when the district gave parents only two days’ notice.

“We wanted to make sure that we gave families that gift of time to be able to decide if the route that we’ve assigned them — the pick-up location, the drop-off location and the schedule — is going to work for their family,” he said.

Handling vacancies

At the last TUSD governing board meeting, administrators presented a potential emergency solution to the math vacancies: hiring online teachers to livestream classes for students on campus.

Trujillo said no decision has been made on that, as the district is waiting to look at its final student enrollment and staffing numbers before the first day of classes, Aug. 4.

Once the district has the final enrollment numbers, administrators will reconsider whether the number of students still justifies hiring for open positions. If not, he said, those vacancies will be closed.

“In some cases, the enrollment does not justify the position, so we’ll be able to close the teacher vacancy with no harm to kids,” he said.

The district will also likely need to increase class sizes across several schools and programs, including exceptional education. Trujillo said it will try to maintain the class sizes it negotiated with Tucson Education Association, the TUSD teachers’ union.

“We know that parents and teachers around the district prefer smaller class sizes for special education and students with disabilities,” Trujillo said. “Those class sizes are going to be a little bit higher, not over the negotiated class sizes.”

As for substitute teachers, Trujillo said, TUSD has about 300 substitutes, compared to the 700-800 substitutes it had on any given day before the pandemic.

“That number has been significantly diminished and continued to go down throughout last year, despite wage increases,” he said.

Trujillo said TUSD might have to resort to internal coverage, in which it asks existing teachers to take on combined classes or give up their planning hours to work extra periods if other alternatives don’t work out.