Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and you're listening to The Takeaway.

Speaker 2: Schools across the country are in crisis. There's a shortage of teachers.

Speaker 3: Arizona schools deal with teacher shortages during normal years, but now with Omicron surging, they're dealing with even fewer teachers available for the classroom.

Speaker 4: This is a problem that's been around actually as long as we can remember. The shortage of substitute teachers, yet another issue made worse by the pandemic.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In some regions, the shortage of school personnel has led some school districts to cancel classes. It's also meant that substitute teachers who help to fill these gaps are more necessary than ever. For more on this, I spoke with Giulia Heyward, reporter at The New York Times.

Giulia Heyward: One thing that's really important to understand is that there have been several working conditions that teachers and other people at schools have faced for decades now. We're talking they're not paid very much, the hours are not anything that anyone wants to work and now you've got this pandemic. People are concerned about their safety, particularly when they're working in a classroom, particularly when they're working with students, not every parent wants to get their child vaccinated. What you're seeing now is a lot of teachers who are either retiring early, they're quitting altogether. We're seeing less and less people at teaching institutions now enrolled in teaching schools. The problem was always there, but the pandemic has made things worse.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Given that there are these staffing shortages, are there actually also substitute shortages? In other words, for all of these same reasons, are there fewer substitute teachers?

Giulia Heyward: It's not even just teachers or substitute teachers, it is literally everyone that you see at a school, the cafeteria worker, the principal, the secretary who works for the principal. We are seeing shortages with every single laborer who works within a school, including substitutes.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Got it. Are there states or regions where this is more of a problem?

Giulia Heyward: We are seeing in particular states, I'm specifically thinking of Missouri and Oregon that have completely gotten rid of their degree requirements. These are states where you may not need a bachelor's or an associate's anymore to become a substitute teacher. We're seeing that in other districts, I'm thinking most recently Chicago, which made headlines for this past week, that is one place where we are seeing Teachers Union telling the school district that they don't want to work in person anymore there. We are seeing it in some areas more than others, but it's pretty much the whole nation that has been affected by this.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Given that we're looking at this national staffing shortage, you're tying it both to these realities happening in the pandemic, but also these pre pandemic realities of living and working in the school system. What has this meant for school districts? Obviously you've name-checked the Chicago example where what it's meant is days without school for families, for students, for teachers who were locked out, for city leaders, but what has it meant beyond these big high profile moments like Chicago?

Giulia Heyward: It's really affecting everybody who makes up the community at a school. Yesterday I spoke with a high school freshman in Detroit who is missing out on a lot of those experiences you get in high school because he's had to do so much of it remotely. This is a place where our kids spend the majority of their day to day and so if we're in a position now where schools are hanging by a thread as some experts have told me because of the lack of labor, because of the lack of available bodies they have in the classroom, the people who stand to suffer the most are kids, the students.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tell me for substitutes, whether they've been substitute teachers, substitute gym and art teachers, whether they've been filling in for, as you said, the secretary in the principal's office, how have they been filling this void?

Giulia Heyward: What you're seeing right now is the principal might become the bus driver or teachers are now teaching classes that they have no expertise in. We've already seen through studies that the pandemic has resulted in learning loss for a lot of students. We are seeing test scores behind what they once were. It's that quality of education isn't as good as it was beforehand and frankly, it is students from more marginalized communities that are going to have to bear the brunt of this disparity we're seeing right now.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Obviously there are districts where teachers are unionized, where perhaps they have some collective bargaining capacity, but even in places where they aren't, there's typically rules that help to protect teachers, at least in some ways as professionals. Do substitute teachers have similar protections or have they been thought of as more disposable and more easily replaceable?

Giulia Heyward: You will definitely see this attitude at a lot of schools where substitutes play second banana. They are the people you bring in when the teacher, the person who does the lesson planning, who for a lot of people does the real work isn't available that day. Frankly, substitutes deal with far less pay than what teachers make, which keep in mind, is still not that great.

Most teachers are grossly underpaid and substitutes, because they're so infrequent within a classroom, you will send a substitute to teach a class that they may not get to teach again ever or a substitute will come in one to two times a month, for example, at least that's what it was previously before this massive labor shortage. Substitutes flew under the radar and they weren't taken as seriously or really as valued as traditional teachers are.

Melissa Harris-Perry: One of the things we've seen in places where labor was profoundly undervalued, let's take for example low wage work in fast food restaurants. Part of what's happened with the labor shortage has been now they're commanding higher wages simply because of the supply demand question, have we seen that for substitute teachers? Do they have more leverage, are they able to ask for better pay and circumstances?

Giulia Heyward: Yes, absolutely. We are seeing school districts try to further incentivize more people to become substitutes. We're seeing states that have lowered the requirements. We're also seeing other districts that are raising the daily pay that are including bonuses, for example. On one hand, substitutes definitely can expect to get paid more and I've spoken to several substitutes across the nation who say that they could work every single day filling in for a classroom if they wanted to, but at the same time, even though the demand has increased, there are a lot of structural issues with substitutes that still hasn't been addressed yet by schools.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Are there solutions on the table? Is there a solution stream out there on the table particularly thinking about the fact that with the Omicron variant, we are reminded that in fact, we are not at the end.

Giulia Heyward: The big thing I've seen is discussion around federal assistance. You'll see this from unions that represent all education workers, including substitutes, that some sort of federal assistance could help bridge the gap with the level of resources that teachers have and the pay that they receive.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Giulia Heyward is a reporter at The New York Times. Giulia, thank you for joining us.

Giulia Heyward: Happy to be here. Thank you.

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