Alexandria City Public Schools is seeing a shortage of classroom monitors, bus monitors and substitute teachers.
Superintendent Gregory Hutchings, Jr. told the School Board last week that ACPS’ Human Resources Department is working to hire more, and that staffing levels were impacted by hybrid learning last year.
“This has been happening since the late spring of last year when many school divisions went into that hybrid approach,” Hutchings told the Board. “We’re currently working to examine school-by-school what some of the trends are in our buildings so we can begin to come up with some solutions on how we’re going to be able to manage this over time.”
Hutchings said the school system has upped substitute teacher interviews to twice a week, that ACPS has started a virtual learning orientation class and has converted on-boarding paperwork to an online format. He also said that 50 classroom monitor applications are pending because of background checks, and that the hours for classroom monitors have been expanded to full-time.
Hutchings also thanked City Council for their recent decision to reinstate school resource officers through the end of the school year to Alexandria City High School and the city’s two middle schools.
“It has been great to see our SRO’s back,” he said. “We’re just thankful that we have this time to work with the School Board as well as the City Council and our community to explore the many resources on reimagining policing in our schools and practices in our schools.”
