As a practical matter, here's what you need to be a substitute teacher in Utah: a pulse.
Because substitutes have lousy pay and lousy jobs - who doesn't remember terrorizing substitute teachers? - school districts just can't find enough warm bodies, let alone certified teachers, to fill in for regular teachers.Substitutes, therefore, are a motley crew. Some are la creme de la creme, teachers and citizens who are above reproach. Others are, um, less so.
All applicants for substitute teaching receive criminal background checks, but they are not automatically rejected if convictions for such things as theft or drunken driving show up. It usually takes something involving drugs or sexual assault to be rejected.
"Our whole goal is not to eliminate subs, because we need them," said Dale Baker, Granite School District personnel director. "All districts are clamoring to get qualified subs."
The issue is a hot one this week owing to the recent arrest of Granite substitute teacher Gayle Sutton for allegedly offering drugs to Jefferson Junior High School students.
She was charged Wednesday with solicitation to distribute a controlled substance on school grounds, a third-degree felony.
Be warned: The substitute teacher instructing little Joey while Mrs. Palooka is out sick could be the best teacher around. He could also be a drug dealer.
School officials freely concede the quality of substitutes would improve if they were paid more, but the money simply isn't there.
Substitutes are paid anywhere from $45 to $65 a day, depending on qualifications. Calculating (as districts do) an eight-hour work day, most substitutes are paid between $6 and $7 per hour.
A first-year teacher, in comparison, gets somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 an hour.
"It's just symptomatic of the whole system that (substitutes) are not well-funded," said Carol Lear, an attorney with the State Office of Education and a former teacher and substitute teacher herself. "In education generally, we shouldn't be so stingy if kids are that important to us."
The law requiring background checks went into effect in 1992. Another law requires police to notify school officials if they arrest a school employee for drug or sexual offenses. But some still fall through the cracks.
Sutton applied to Granite School District to be a substitute in March 1992. However, because she had previously worked in the district as a kitchen aide in 1990, the district decided not to do a background check.
The district has since changed its policy. Now it requires a background check of former employees if they haven't worked in the district for six months.
In 1993, while she was working in the district, Sutton was convicted of a shoplifting charge and jailed for two weeks. She was charged with a similar crime last month for which an arrest warrant was oustanding.But because the offenses were not sex- or drug-related, school officials were not notified and didn't know about them.
"We're a little nervous right now that this lady apparently had convictions on a number of crimes," said Granite District spokesman Kent Gardner. "Here we are with kind of a bad-apple substitute, we're putting her to work in the classroom, and we don't have any way of telling that these things happened."
Technically, according to the law, a substitute teacher could rob a bank, engage police in gunplay and take them on a high-speed chase without school officials being notified.
"Maybe that law ought to be looked at," Gardner said.
Every school district has a list of approved substitutes. Regular substitutes are required to have attended college - 90 credit hours in most districts, or about two years' worth of college classes. Emergency substitutes, used when regular substitutes aren't available (a frequent occurrence), need only a high school diploma and are paid somewhat less.
Often even emergency substitutes aren't available.
Though district officials don't like to talk about it, what sometimes happens in those cases is somebody - anybody, no background check, no qualifications, no nothing - comes in and, basically, babysits.
"(Teachers) are supposed to work through the district, but they don't always," said state schools attorney Lear. "They can't find anybody, so they get their brother-in-law or something."
Lear said districts should have a policy of strict compliance: If the substitute isn't previously approved by the district, he or she doesn't get paid.
The whole problem comes down to attracting good candidates. Many teachers say substitute teaching is an awful job. Substitutes are employed "at will," meaning they can be fired at any time for any reason. The schedule is unpredictable. Regular teachers often look down their noses at them. They don't know the students, who often take advantage of them.
"When we all were students and we had a substitute, it was one of those aha days," Baker said.
In spite of being critical to the smooth functioning of schools, substitutes are the freak stepchildren of the educational system.
"It's not at all like being the regular teacher," said Dale Manning, personnel director for the Salt Lake City School District. "It's rough."
"Talk about a miserable job," Lear said. "You get paid a pretty minimal amount for all that pain and suffering."
Deseret News staff writer Marjorie Cortez contributed to this report.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Using education majors as substitute teachers
Utah State Office of Education attorney Carol Lear has an idea to improve the pool of substitute teachers, many of which are minimally qualified.
She proposes working with colleges and universities to arrange for education majors to receive college credit by substituting.
"I think it's pretty viable. It would just take a little groundwork," she said. "They do this in a lot of other fields, like law firms. You have people who are training to be teachers, and it would be a good training ground."
Lear said prospective teachers would be high-quality substitutes - enthusiastic and eager to do well, especially if their performance affected their grade.
Some school officials point out that the education system contains a real dichotomy. Students training to be teachers aren't entrusted with a class until they go through the required college education courses, hundreds of hours of student teaching under close supervision and certification.
Completely untrained substitutes, on the other hand, are often entrusted with 30 wide-eyed children on a moment's notice.