Some math lessons in Tucson Unified School District could be streamed onto classroom screens by teachers from a Chicago-based company because the district is struggling to find enough teachers here.
With the new school year less than three weeks away, TUSD is considering hiring the company as a temporary solution for its shortage of up to 24 math teachers at a dozen schools.
Certified teachers from the company, Elevate K-12, would provide live-streamed math instruction where needed during the 2022-2023 school year, said Flori Huitt, TUSD’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.
“We wanted to bring this just as a proactive, temporary solution for our district given the number of vacancies that is very daunting,” Huitt told the TUSD governing board at Tuesday’s meeting.
The contract, potentially for $780,000, would cost significantly less than the approximate $1.77 million it would cost the district to fill all 24 vacancies.
However, the district would still have to hire additional classroom managers to be physically present with the students.
TUSD did not provide an estimate for how much it would cost to hire those managers, but spokeswoman Leslie Lenhart said the district would not incur additional costs from those positions.
“It would not cost the district more because our current vacancy savings would cover the cost of these positions,” Lenhart said.
Board members have not yet taken action on the matter, as the district is still focusing on recruiting additional teachers. But Huitt said it was important to discuss in case the district needs to contract with Elevate K-12 in time for the first day of school on Aug. 4.
The district is facing its second year of vast teacher shortages, this time largely of certified math teachers, as well as of qualified substitute teachers who could step in as content experts for math classes, Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo said.
“What that’s going to cause is our students to be further behind,” Huitt said, “especially if they have roving subs or different teachers that are not consistently there giving them the instruction that they need so that they can be successful.”
In the previous school year, Trujillo said, the district turned to its existing teachers and asked them to surrender their planning hours to work additional class periods as schools struggled with vacancies and teacher absences midyear.
“It created a lot of burnout, a lot of employee anxiety and frustration as they were taken away from their primary duties and moved into, essentially, substitute roles, so we want to make sure we don’t replicate that mistake again,” Trujillo told the Arizona Daily Star.
“Online learning lite”
Elevate K-12 would be in charge of assigning certified math teachers to the requested TUSD classrooms.
According to an Elevate K-12 video shown at the TUSD meeting, the online teacher would be projected in a large display at the front of the classroom for all students to engage in the same daily lesson. The teacher, in turn, would view the students altogether in the classroom, rather than each student individually.
The video says Elevate teachers have access to different curriculums created by the company, which are aligned with both national and state standards, and are customizable to individual classes and teachers’ notes.
Lenhart said Elevate’s curriculums align with Common Core and state-specific standards. In addition, she said, the company would work with the district to ensure the lessons also align with TUSD’s math curriculum guidelines.
Like most distance learning models, the Elevate program offers students the opportunity to virtually raise their hands to ask questions or message the teacher privately to ask for help during class.
All Elevate teachers are certified in their respective grades and subjects, and have more than five years of teaching experience, according to information presented at the meeting.
“It’s kind of like online learning lite,” Trujillo told the Star. “It’s kind of like a halfway point where the students are physically in the classroom in desks, still having access to all the resources of the school.”
Huitt said Elevate offers the district the opportunity to both relieve teachers of the heavy workload to prevent burnout, and ensures that students always have a certified teacher to present the material.
“Even if we were to get teachers to cover periods, they may not have that specific mathematical content knowledge to be able to provide that instruction that is so particular for these secondary school years,” she said.
The district provided a list of 12 schools in the district that were facing teacher shortages, but administrators reiterated they’re still in the process of interviewing potential hires for those positions.
The schools are Booth Fickett K-8 School; Pistor, Valencia, Doolen and Mansfeld middle schools; and Catalina, Cholla, Rincon, Sabino, Sahuaro, Santa Rita and Pueblo high schools.
Reactions to more virtual learning
Christina Berry, mother of an incoming sophomore student at Pueblo High School, one of the schools on the list of vacancies, said she understands why the district had to turn to this potential solution.
And, while she doesn’t think it’s a perfect alternative, she also doesn’t worry too much about the changes affecting her child’s education.
She said all her kids had a difficult time with distance learning during the beginning of the pandemic because it was easy for them to become distracted and disengaged, and ultimately lose motivation for their studies.
But, she believes the situation will be much different if it’s only one online class on campus, where the students can still socialize in other classes throughout the day.
“If it’s math only and it’s that one period and they’re going to be in a classroom supervised while a teacher is teaching them online, I think that’s OK,” Berry said.
“I would rather have that than have multiple substitute teachers rotating around different styles of teaching all in one semester. That can take a toll on the student,” she added.
But Margaret Chaney, president of the Tucson Education Association, expressed concern for those students who typically don’t learn well with online classes.
“My biggest concern is if my kid’s not experiencing success online, do I have the option of pulling them out of there and placing them with a live teacher?” Chaney said of a possible scenario for students and parents.
Teacher costs are the same
The cost of an Elevate teacher wouldn’t be much different than the cost of an average salary for a TUSD teacher, she said.
The average salary for a full-time TUSD teacher, including benefits, is about $65,000. The yearly cost per teacher with Elevate would also be approximately $65,000, Huitt said.
To put that number in perspective, she said, it would cost the district about $780,000 to have Elevate teachers cover a total of 60 class periods each day for the duration of the 2022-2023 school year, with each class being 45-60 minutes long.
The district would be responsible for providing all the technical equipment to connect TUSD students to Elevate teachers, Huitt said.
She added that Elevate would also be responsible for replacing any of its absent teachers, rather than the schools and TUSD teachers scrambling to find a last-minute replacement.
“Nobody’s preferred solution”
But partnering with Elevate K-12 would still not relieve the district of the pressure to hire more personnel in time for the coming school year.
Trujillo said the district needs to hire at least 24 classroom managers — assuming they could work full school days — to manage the logistics of an Elevate classroom, such as ensuring students’ safety and that classwork is flowing smoothly.
Those classroom managers, he said, would most likely be teacher assistants hired specifically for that role to avoid pulling staff members from other school departments as the district did in the previous year.
Trujillo said TUSD had already advertised vacancies for teacher assistant positions that were budgeted in the original fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, prior to considering the Elevate K-12 partnership.
Noting the shortage of teaching assistants, Chaney said she is concerned the district would also struggle to fill those positions, and ultimately have to pull them out of other classrooms that need them.
Responding to a request from board member Ravi Shah, Trujillo said the district could look to assign some certified math teachers from Tucson Unified Virtual Academy to other high schools if the enrollment numbers allow for that flexibility.
Still, Chaney expressed doubt that this would be the solution to preventing teacher burnout throughout the district, noting that educators have been dealing with other big workloads aside from covering additional class periods.
“A lot of teachers left this past year because it was ridiculously overwhelming. The amount of work that was compounded on everybody’s plate was just horrendous,” she said, referring to teacher meetings, pressure over testing, collecting new data and dealing with behavioral issues inside the classroom.
“Administrators get to go back into their offices and retreat every now and then, but teachers are on all the time,” Chaney said.
Trujillo said that “this is nobody’s preferred solution,” but facing so many vacancies just shy of the start of the new school year has pushed the district to think outside the box.
If the district is unable to hire the necessary math teachers in time, the TUSD governing board can be expected to take action on this measure by the end of July or early August, Lenhart said.
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