Help wanted: This company is offering bonuses to try to hire hundreds of subs to staff Philly classrooms
Teacher pay rates range from $126.76 for uncertified employees to $229.92 per day for retired teachers who work as long-term substitutes. Here are all the pay rates offered by ESS.
The company recently chosen by the Philadelphia School District to find and place substitute teachers in city classrooms is making an all-out push for staff — but still has a ways to go.
ESS Northeast has about 680 substitute teachers hired for the 2022-23 school year, said Peter Coppola, the recruiter who specializes in Philadelphia staffing for the company. And while he said there was “no ceiling” to the number of substitute teachers ESS hopes to hire, an official with Kelly Services — the company contracted to hire subs last year — said it had about 1,000 sub jobs to fill per day in October, a high but not unprecedented number.
Teacher pay rates range from $126.76 for uncertified employees to $229.92 per day for retired teachers who work as long-term substitutes. ESS is also offering all teachers a $25-per-day bonus, and offering $125 to substitutes who work 25 days before the end of the calendar year to offset the cost of paperwork necessary to become state certified.
It’s also offering a $100 bonus for anyone who refers a successful job candidate to ESS.
» READ MORE: 'It's got to get better': A look inside the challenging, complicated year at one Philly elementary school
Finding substitutes last year was especially difficult for the district, and many others around the country. At most schools, the majority of sub jobs went unfilled, creating significant strain on teachers forced to give up prep periods to cover classes and administrators left to scramble to plug holes.
After struggling through a high vacancy rate, the school system cut ties with Kelly Educational Services, its substitute provider since 2016, at the end of last school year. The district signed a two-year, $58 million contract with ESS.
Philadelphia used to recruit and hire its own substitutes. It outsourced the job in 2015, when Source4Teachers was awarded a contract, but the company’s performance was poor, the School Reform Commission and administration said at the time, and Kelly took over in 2016.
Source4Teachers merged with ESS in 2017.
Though the work is meaningful, a tough labor market has made hiring tricky, said Coppola, who’s been attending job fairs and plans to hop aboard a district school bus touring the city in August as a way to drum up more candidates.
“It’s been extremely difficult,” said Coppola. “But the job has flexibility, it puts people in the community, helping out students, teaching young people during a shortage of teachers. It comes with a lot of bragging rights, in my opinion.”
Pennsylvania lawmakers passed a bill in December giving districts some flexibility in hiring substitutes. Schools can use college students and recent education graduates as substitutes, and those who are 25 years or older with at least 60 college credits or three years of experience as a paraprofessional can work as “classroom monitors” to fill sub vacancies. Those temporary changes are effective for the 2022-23 school year, as well.