Teachers scramble to find vaccine seen as key to keeping schools open

Students in the Port Washington-Saukville School District returned to classrooms full time Monday, but one of the keys to keeping them there — Covid-19 vaccinations for school staff members — remains shrouded in uncertainty amid increasing  criticism of the federal and state rollout of the vaccine. 

“This is a huge source of frustration,” Laura Rashid, a longtime teacher at Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Port Washington, said during an interview Tuesday. 

“The kids just came back yesterday. Was I ready for them? Definitely. But I just wish we had our vaccinations.”

With some area school districts having to close their buildings because of teacher shortages and others, including the Port-Saukville District, scrambling to cover for teachers who are sick or quarantined amid a shortage of substitute teachers, getting the vaccine in the arms of educators is seen as an essential step toward resuming normal education and aiding an economic recovery.

“Getting parents back to work depends on our schools being open and students not having to quarantine,” Rashid said. “I’m frustrated and many of my colleagues are as well. You try to register for the vaccine and within an hour all the slots are gone.”

At the direction of the Washington Ozaukee Public Health Department, the district has advised staff members to register on the health department’s website for vaccinations and wait to be notified when they are available, Director of Special Services Duane Woelfel told the School Board Monday.

The department has also advised school staff members to register with pharmacies and health care providers for the vaccine and recommended that the district explore contracting with a private vaccine provider, Woelfel said.   

The district has tried unsuccessfully to contact VaxPro, a Mequon company that specializes in corporate flu vaccinations and has been approved to administer Covid-19 vaccinations, Woelfel said. 

While it had been hoped that all of the district’s staff members could be vaccinated at once, it appears just as likely now that they will receive shots one at a time over the course of weeks depending on where and when they registered for the vaccine.

That, said middle school teacher Sandy Crain, adds tension to the already stressful situation of teaching during the pandemic.

“What happens if we get the call (that the vaccine is available) and we can’t get there?  It’s not like we can just leave work to get a shot,” Crain, who is president of the Port Washington-Saukville Education Association, the union representing teachers in the district, said. “There are a lot of questions and a lot of frustration right now.”

Crain said she believes the district is doing whatever it can for its employees, and Woelfel, who noted administrators have tried unsuccessfully to contract with a local pharmacy and become a state-approved mass vaccination site, said the district will continue its efforts to help staff members get vaccinations.

“We’re anxiously awaiting when that will be,” he said. “It’s a wait-and-see game now.  We’re trying to advocate the best we can and be as patient as we can.”

Meanwhile, the district is working to bolster the ranks of its substitute teachers, which administrators concede is an uphill battle at a time when the pandemic has exacerbated the shortage of fill-in teachers.

Whatever ability teachers had to fill in for each other while the district was providing its hybrid mix of in-person and online instruction is gone with students back in classrooms full time, and it’s not unusual to see principals in classrooms teaching.

The district has contacted area universities in the hopes of recruiting students in their teaching programs but has been told that those students must spend a semester student teaching before they can work as substitutes.

The district now plans to offer student teaching opportunities for the first semester of next school year so college students can work as substitutes during the second semester. Because training student teachers requires a considerable amount of extra work, the district would pay a stipend to staff teachers who take on that responsibility.

The district currently has two to three substitutes who work periodically in the schools and seven long-term substitutes, Supt. Michael Weber said. Long-term substitutes typically fill in for teachers who are on 12-week maternity and six-week paternity leaves.

Of those seven, five have indicated they want to continue substituting in the district after they complete their current assignments, Weber said. The district plans to offer them special contracts under which they will be available to fill in as needed five days a week and receive five paid sick days and one personal day. They will also be paid at a rate that is slightly higher than the standard substitute teacher wage.

“All that being said, this is a challenge,” Weber said. “It will continue to be a challenge, but we’ll continue shaking the trees and see what we come up with.”

Another challenge facing the district is finding enough preparation time for teachers who are now educating students in classrooms at the same time they are teaching students at home who participate in classes online in real time, or synchronously, because they are ill, quarantined or because their parents have opted not to have them attend in-person classes.

In response, the School Board on Monday approved early student release days on six Wednesdays this semester. Shortening the school day by two hours on those days will give teachers time to plan as well as help students who are struggling, administrators said. 

Under the district’s hybrid system, all students were at home learning online on Wednesdays, which gave teachers time to prepare and provide additional support to students who needed it. That time is gone with the return to full-time classroom instruction.

Administrators noted that several other districts added early release days to their calendars this year because of the additional time needed to prepare to teach students both in person and online.

“Our teachers are working extremely hard,” Weber said. “A little extra professional prep time will be extremely useful.”

Early release days used to be a standard part of the school calendar but were eliminated in large part because they were unpopular among parents who had to make special arrangements for their children on those days.

Board member Aaron Paulin, a teacher at West Bend West High School, said that while providing adequate teacher preparation time is important, using early release days to do it causes disruptions. 

“I understand the importance of prep time,” Paulin, who abstained from voting on the measure, said. “But my concern is with half days and the amount of disruption they cause for families and students.

“They cause a lot of problems and are definitely not family friendly.”