Manatee School District has an $810,000 substitute teacher ‘crisis,’ leaders say

Manatee County School Board members have rejected a staggering last-minute request for more than $800,000 to cover substitute teachers through May, when students leave for the summer. District leaders are blaming the COVID-19 pandemic for their increased costs while board members are questioning the apparent lack of foresight.

After calling for a better solution to the “crisis” and the “dire” situation, as two board members called it, they instead scheduled a follow-up conversation for Friday morning. The board also approved a $210,360 lifeline to buy district leaders some time.

“I’m concerned that at this point in the school year — we’ve got a month and a half — we’re going to leave our teachers without subs,” the district’s human resources director, Wendy Mungillo, said during Tuesday’s board meeting. “We’re going to leave our schools high and dry.”

Last year, the School Board outsourced all of its substitute hiring and management to a company called ESS, approving a contract for $2.5 million each year through June 30, 2024. The hope was that ESS could attract more substitutes and better fill classroom vacancies.

But COVID created a need for more help and the district was quickly running out of money in the approved budget for substitutes, leading the district to request another $810,360 on top of this year’s contract amount.

The school district anticipated a need for that extra money — which would bring this year’s substitute budget to more than $3.3 million — to continue paying ESS for its substitutes.

Superintendent Cynthia Saunders and Deputy Superintendent Doug Wagner said the spike resulted from teachers calling out during the pandemic, to care for sick family members or quarantine for their own COVID-19 symptoms and exposures.

Between August and March, local schools made 18,691 requests for substitute teachers, more than doubling the requests made in the 2018-2019 school year, according to data from the school district.

Invoices for substitute teachers were pouring in while the approved budget was running out, Wagner said, soliciting the School Board’s approval on Tuesday night.

“It puts us in a bit of a bind where you don’t have the money to cover invoices that are coming,” he said. “Yes, we should have come here earlier. ... It’s just hard to forecast.”

Most board members were quick to reject the requested budget increase, even after Wagner said he would try to recover that $810,000 through the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic (CARES) Act.

“I believe you when you say that you need $810,000,” said James Golden, the board’s vice chair. “You need to believe us when we say we’re not going to approve that.”

Board member Scott Hopes said he feared the district was nearing a “head-on collision to violating state law,” noting that Florida prohibits boards from approving a higher amount after the original board-approved budget was already exceeded. They needed a solution before that over-run happens.

And if the board approved $810,000, the district would have no leverage to negotiate a better deal with ESS after Tuesday night, said Hopes, who is also the acting administrator for Manatee County government.

“This should not be coming to us in the final stretch of the year at this amount of money,” Hopes said, adding that he was “not willing to bail anybody out” on Tuesday.

Calling his vote a “hard no,” the School Board’s chair, Charlie Kennedy, said he hoped ESS would reconsider its pricing as a show of good faith during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“If they would like to have a long-term relationship with the district, then let’s come together, let’s amend this contract and let’s reduce this eye-popping number,” Kennedy said.

Alternatively, the board could end its contract with ESS and bring the hiring and management of substitutes back to Manatee’s human resources department, a potential cost-saving measure, board member Mary Foreman said.

It was doable, Manatee’s HR director responded, but it would be incredibly time-consuming. When the school district partnered with ESS, all of Manatee’s substitute teachers moved to the company’s payroll, meaning they would have to be rehired if the board severed its relationship with ESS.

“Can we turn this around in HR?” Mungillo said. “Sure. I’m going to need a lot of extra staff to do that — to bring 700 new employees back into the district. It’s fingerprinting, drug testing, processing them all. But my concern is we’ll lose subs in that process.

“Right now our substitutes can get paid every week, whereas the school district can only pay them every other week,” Mungillo continued. “As a public institution, we cannot provide incentives or bonuses to those substitutes. Through ESS, they’re allowed to have bonuses for things like you work so many Fridays in a month, or if you work continuously, they get bonuses.”

Foreman also had concerns with using money from the CARES Act to cover the requested $810,000. While it was a possible solution, that money could be used elsewhere in the district, she said, pointing to the need for counselors and other resources.

“I consider this a crisis,” Foreman said. “Sometimes you have to do weird things during a crisis to get through. I don’t know if they do it in Florida, but where I come from the school board members went and substituted. You’ve got administrative personnel who could go and substitute. I pity the class that got me, but I’m willing to jump in and do that.”

While the Manatee School Board plans to continue brainstorming at Friday’s meeting, the district was also in desperate need of a temporary solution to avoid going over budget, so the board unanimously approved an increase of $210,360 on Tuesday night.

“I don’t really like the fact that it’s coming to us and it’s this dire,” board member Gina Messenger said on Tuesday, addressing district leaders. “I’m looking at you and it seems dire. That’s really not OK. That is really not OK. However, I also don’t want to leave our classrooms and teachers in a place where they don’t have what they need.”

Friday’s workshop

What: Includes the substitute teacher discussion, among other agenda items.

When and where: Begins at 9 a.m. in the School Support Center, 215 Manatee Ave. W. in Bradenton.

Restrictions: In-person guests must wear a mask and undergo a temperature check.

How to watch on TV: Anyone can also watch the meetings by visiting the Manatee Schools Television website, mstv.us, and by tuning into Spectrum Channel 646 or Frontier Channel 39.

This story was originally published April 28, 2021 at 1:04 PM.