A teacher calls out but no substitute picks up the job. So, the class gets split across other rooms, a colleague loses a planning period, or an assistant principal stands in front of 28 kids instead of doing their own job. Now multiply that across every school in your district, every day of the year. It adds up to lost instructional time and a quiet tax on the staff who cover the gap. How often is it happening in your district? Most districts can’t say precisely.
Gwinnett County Public Schools can. Its substitute team pulls fill rates school by school every month and reports them to the board. Those numbers are why the district felt confident making substitute hiring more selective this year: with 4,400 active substitutes, 94.5% of them working, and fill rates closing last year just under 90% with no school below 70%, the data showed Gwinnett could hire fewer and choose better.
Velia Verdiguel, Senior Human Resources Manager at GCPS, joins Kevin Agnello, Group Product Manager at Frontline Education, to break down how they did it.
We’ll explore:
- How Gwinnett rebuilt its substitute hiring process, and why it chose to be more selective
- What fill rate data reveals about which schools struggle to get covered, and how the team responds
- What keeps substitutes coming back to a building, and what drives them away
- Why more of your fill rate is within your control than most administrators assume
