Hi ladies, do you feel like substitute teachers get paid and treated particularly poorly? I feel like they have the rawest deal.

Not at the school system I work at. I’m a para who now just subs. The f/t pay is awful, but the sub pay is even worse. A sub only gets what a starting para gets, no matter how many years you worked as a f/t para. No wonder they can’t find anyone who wants to sub as a para anymore. You can get a job at Walmart or Aldi starting at $17 or more per hour with full benefits, compared to $13 starting as a sp/ed para. Pretty pathetic.

I was a sub for years. In CA, we have a "shortage" - whatever that means - so subs are paid pretty well.

I will say for when I was a sub, I did what the lesson plan said and let the kids decide whether they would follow it. Bottom line is that subs are there to make sure the kids are safe and provide the information left by the teacher. They don't have the relationship, connection, or bond that the teacher has, so they can only do what they can do.

If someone decides to be a sub in a district that treats them raw, that's a choice they make.

In our district subs don't have to have a degree.

They don't have to write lesson plans or correct papers unless they are long term subs. They don't attend after school meetings (unless they want to).

I am pretty sure the pay is $200 a day

Here in Las Vegas we got a raise after many years. I work in a title 1 school and am the sub just for 1 school. I get $180 a day and if I work a prep I get $205 a day. I have no lesson plans or grading to do. I just fill in. I love my job!

Where I am, I believe it is hardly minimum wage. I have always found this to be egregious and it's so incredibly difficult to pick up from another educator and try to replicate but have to immediately jump into managing the kids, replicating the classroom environment, and if it's for weeks, not totally tanking the weeks and setting the prinicpal teacher back.

Subs should be entitled to benefits if they are building based subs

I started out teaching at the beginning of the school year as a long term sub. I had 100% of the expectations certified teachers had, including putting in grades, staying after school for conferences, and arriving before my official start time. I was given no resources and had to create 6/7th grade curriculum and lesson plans for 5 subjects from scratch! I was paid $12 an hour with no overtime or benefits. I was expecting my first child and worked through my pregnancy until spring break, right before my due date. The principal tried to force me to create lesson plans for the remainder of the school year, when I would be unpaid. Luckily HR stepped in and I didn’t have to. I continued to be underpaid and found out that paras with less responsibilities were making more than me.

What kills me are the third party services that call themselves human resource companies—-such as ESS—that seem to make it easier for school districts to get long-term subs without having to eventually offer them a contract. For example, I did a maternity leave replacement a few years ago, and the district hired me with a contract at the salary I was entitled to according to their teacher contract. However, during COVID, starting at the beginning of October in 2020, I took over a class in another district for a teacher who didn’t want to teach in-person (she took an unpaid leave for the year) and the district paid me on a per-diem basis via ESS for the entire time I was there. I did the same work as all the other first grade teachers but earned less than 1/4 of what I should have according to their contract. I received no benefits and took home less than $25K that year. This was in what’s believed to be the wealthiest town in New Jersey. I should add, at the time I had about 20 years of classroom teaching experience, 5 years as a school administrator, an MA in education, another advanced degree in ed leadership, and was finishing my PhD in teacher education, so I could have been eligible for a pretty high salary.

We have super subs over here and they get paid 288 a day. I think that they are making more money than me.