By Taylor Conley
No longer will a Latin teacher run your chemistry class.
With the use of a new substitute teacher staffing agency called Scoot Education, Tempe Prep will bring in back-up teachers on days when regular staff are absent. Besides Mr. Lambros and Assistant Athletic Director Coach David Lane, who have joined the substitute-teaching staff, students may see teachers who have never set foot on campus before. This enables TPA to have extra support on days when only a few teachers are absent.
The agency’s stand-in teachers are not just random people; ideally, they have expertise in the appropriate subject area so they can be a resource to students. Mrs. Drake, the Dean of Faculty, said, “The primary benefit is in respecting the time of our faculty. There’s only so much time during the day when teachers aren’t teaching.”
After the early pandemic years filled with frequent and often required absences, subbing got harder for teachers. So hiring substitutes seemed like the perfect solution. However, regular teachers can still volunteer to substitute at an hourly rate.
Initially, TPA never hired substitute teachers “because of its community philosophy,” said Mrs. Drake. And unlike most public schools in Tempe, where teachers teach five or six classes a day, most TPA teachers instruct four. So in the past, TPA would use this extra time in a system of internal subbing, where staff would fill in for other teachers in their free periods. In cases of late-notice absences, teachers would notify a colleague and then someone would inform Mr. Lambros. Mrs. Drake said, “It was this complicated, convoluted system just to get subs.”
Over the summer, as administrators and staff planned for the upcoming school year, they started talking about using a new, streamlined sub process and questioned whether internal subbing was necessary. Using a website called InstaSub, teachers can now easily notify the school of absences. And with the new sub agency, Scoot, students can still have productive classes while their teachers are absent.