Aaron C. Spence, Virginia Beach City Public Schools Superintendent, joins Yahoo Finance to discuss the impact of teacher shortages and burnout.
Video Transcript
JARED BLIKRE: Welcome back. The labor shortage is hitting all aspects of US society, including education, where school hours are being curtailed in some parts because of a lack of teachers. Here to break it down for us in one particular jurisdiction is Aaron C. Spence. He is Virginia City-- Virginia Beach City Public School superintendent. And we also have Yahoo Finance's Aarthi Swaminathan. Aaron, thank you for joining us here today. Can you tell us the particulars of what's going on in your district and what you're seeing here?
AARON C. SPENCE: Yeah, so we're dealing with a lot of things, obviously. We're we're trying to keep school up in the middle of a pandemic. And we're dealing with fairly significant staffing shortages and dealing with some academic challenges that are becoming clearer and clearer to us as we've had students back in school. And I think all of those things are leading to a lot of stress for our teachers and the need for us to try to work together to resolve some of that so that they can be at their best for our kids.
AARTHI SWAMINATHAN: Some of the labor pressures that you're seeing has led you to cut, for instance, hours on Wednesdays. How bad is the pain right now? And why did you arrive at that decision? Was it the parents? Was it teachers? What kind of forced you to take that direction?
AARON C. SPENCE: Yeah, well, we're hearing a lot from our teachers. And I think I want to be clear. This is not a Virginia Beach issue, right? This is a state and national issue. I think we're hearing from teachers all across the country that they're tired. They taught during a pandemic. They were asked to do things that they had never been asked to do before.
I think we got into the spring of last year, and things felt like they might be a little bit more normal as we headed into this new school year. And then the delta variant got us, and we had to open the new school year under a lot of the same mitigation protocols as before. And you add into that that there are significant academic challenges, as I said, that we're just starting to figure out. And our teachers are just tired. They're tired, and they're overwhelmed and dealing with a lot of the mental health issues that I think many folks are dealing with as a result of the pandemic.
So we talked to them about how we could help, and they gave us a lot of different thoughts. And one of the things they told us was we just need more time. One of the things I mentioned was staffing shortages. We have about-- we're about 100 positions short instructionally in Virginia Beach right now. And so teachers are covering classes. They're covering hallways. They're covering cafeterias. And they don't have the kind of unencumbered planning time that that they need to have in order to best prepare for instruction for our students.