Comprehensive Substitute Coverage: 4 Best Practices To Adopt Right Now

Build a substitute pool. Make a long-term recruiting plan. Improve with technology.

If you’re an HR director or otherwise involved with substitute management in K12 education, then you’ve probably seen these three best practices repeated by experts for years. And yes, they’re very important components to successful absence management.

However, when you’re facing a shortage of substitutes — perhaps even a dearth of full-time teachers — these fundamentals alone do not ensure the absence coverage you need. In fact, they barely scratch the surface of what truly strategic, holistic, adaptable, and modernized substitute management can look like.

Why? Because these three practices all focus on only one half of the equation. What is the other half? Absence management.

Both substitute and absence management processes create the conditions that either ensure sufficient absence coverage or perpetuate gaps. When each side of the ecosystem is intentionally orchestrated, fill rates improve — which means students keep on learning even if their teacher is out!

The Shift Toward Holistic Substitute and Absence Management

As the need for absence coverage grows, K12 districts and schools are expanding and modernizing the age-old tenants of successful substitute management. As a result, there has been a steady shift towards taking a more comprehensive and holistic approach. 

The Pennsylvania Department of Education and Substantial captured the spirit of this shift in their August 2021 strategy brief. Rather than emphasizing substitute recruitment — the historical approach — the two organizations instead encourage administrators to balance designing the optimal substitute role, recruiting high-quality candidates, and retaining those substitutes through ongoing engagement.

[IMAGE CREDIT: Strategy Brief: Building Strong Substitutes Programs (Pennsylvania DOE & Substantial Classrooms, August 2021)]

At the core of these changes is a mindset shift that honors and uplifts the incredible work and vital role of substitutes in a school ecosystem. Here are just a few of the strategies that schools across the U.S. are increasingly adopting:

• Offer professional development to substitute teachers: Not only does professional development benefit substitutes as it does full-time staff, but most substitutes want more training, too. Quality professional learning can make a huge difference in both ensuring high-quality instructional practices and enriching the substitute experience. According to Red Rover’s 2023 Substitute Survey, many substitutes are especially keen on professional learning for trauma-informed teaching practices.
• Invest in a welcoming and attractive work environment: Some districts might lean on traditional incentives, like bonuses or other financial draws. But many more are getting creative with how they showcase their respect and support for substitutes, as well as how they reward them, to encourage substitutes to come back to their sites. These strategies boil down to cultivating a welcoming environment for substitutes as members of the larger community. 
• Real-time, modern communication channels: Old-school methods of contacting substitutes just don’t suffice in the modern era or meet the pressing need for coverage that schools face today. Districts can now leverage technologies like Red Rover to enable real-time outreach about emergent job opportunities and changes to scheduled assignments, leading to faster or more comprehensive coverage.

Though these changes take time and effort, they have a powerful impact. And with a double-shortage of both teachers and substitutes still affecting many schools across the country, these changes are all the more critical to start implementing NOW.

But even these improvements don’t guarantee sufficient absence coverage if they occur in isolation.

When districts take a holistic approach to absence and substitute management — rather than treat each half of the system separately — they stand a better chance to ensure student learning continues as smoothly as possible when the inevitable arises.

4 High-Impact Practices For Comprehensive Substitute Coverage 

Let’s explore four best practices that holistically bridge the gap between absence and substitute management, and how districts can implement them.

Collect, analyze, and strategize with robust absence management data

Data are invaluable for orchestrating effective substitute-absence coverage, from seeing the full calendar of upcoming absences to the minutiae of each absence and how it’s filled. The more insight you have, the more nuanced changes you can introduce to your absence management strategy. Perhaps more important, though, is the way that data can help administrators keep their substitutes engaged and eager to return to their campuses in the future.

One Red Rover partner has found great value in a quarterly examination of the Red Rover “Substitute Pool Health Report” to reveal the crucial connection between substitute engagement and the actual absences covered by subs. In addition to analyzing fill rates and flagging persistent gaps in coverage, their district team uses the report to celebrate substitutes who are going above and beyond in supporting their classrooms. 

Additionally, this district’s teachers use Red Rover to both request time off and view their time-off balances. At the same time, their principals and other admins involved in approving time off can view the entire school’s calendar of planned absences. By arming everyone with data, Red Rover ensures both sides of the process have the information they need to honor teacher time off, provide coverage for those anticipated absences, and — thanks to real-time communication tools in the Red Rover app — flex quickly find coverage when the unexpected arises.

Building habits and practices of data analysis across both district-level and school-level teams allows educators to make more informed, strategic decisions around substitute coverage and management. Modern K12 workforce solutions like Red Rover give you the necessary in-depth visibility into your substitute management data, as well as the big picture across your schools. 

Prioritize strategic interoperability, not “one-size-fits-all” platforms

The more your modern workforce management ecosystem evolves, the more interoperability will make or break its efficacy. This pattern impacts the solutions that help with recruiting, hiring, and engaging substitutes as well as the tools that manage teacher time off and leave. 

Take the interactions between payroll and time-off balances, for instance. As mentioned earlier, it helps teachers to know how much time off they have available as they plan personal days. Administrators involved in the approval workflow benefit from visibility into both that teacher’s time-off balance and the school’s calendar of scheduled absences. 

The kicker here is that these datasets might not live within the same ecosystem (or if they do, the information itself may come with major caveats — more on that in a moment). Red Rover has several partners that utilize payroll processing systems such as LINQ, Munis, and Kronos, while absence approvals and substitute assignments are managed in our solutions.

It’s interoperability that brings these disparate datasets together under one roof in Red Rover for successful absence and substitute management. A Red Rover partner who streamlined extra duty coverage in this way describes it best: 

But beware of K12 platforms that purport to support interoperability as part of an “all-inclusive” package of solutions — these myths come with hidden costs and pains for educators.  

Reinforce great prep and communication habits among all teaching staff

According to our 2023 Substitute Survey, “a reliable lesson plan” is a top attractor for substitutes when they consider a new assignment or returning to support a classroom. But it is quickly followed by related desires like “knowing I can make a difference,” “friendly office staff,” and “relationships with teachers at the school.”

What do all of these attractors have in common?

First, substitutes appreciate when both teachers and school leadership embrace a pre-planning mentality when it comes to absence coverage. Rather than scrambling at the last minute to prepare sub materials — or worse, not prepping anything at all — staff ensure there’s something ready to go for a substitute, even if they aren’t planning to take any time off. 

Pre-planning also means giving substitutes the basic knowledge of how your school operates before each assignment, including details like where to park to how to check in with the front office. As an administrator and member of your school community, you set the tone for effective planning practices with your teaching staff, encouraging them to prepare emergency lesson plans well before they are needed. With Red Rover, you and your team can centralize these resources and set up your substitutes for success with the School and Classroom Profile pages. 

The second commonality is the proactive and bidirectional communication these attractors inherently require. If creating a welcoming environment improves a substitute’s experience, then it takes the entire school community to nurture that environment, and communication is foundational to those efforts.

One easy way to start is by assigning each new substitute a “teaching buddy” from your full-time staff, a point of contact for questions and asks that the substitute might have as they settle into the community. Or consider arranging check-in/check-out times directly with each substitute on campus that day. It’s a great opportunity to hear their feedback and build a personal connection. Each of these strategies was highly impactful for one district as they worked to “break the script” on their substitute experience.

However you choose to build your communication channels, it’s important to set clear expectations with all staff involved, including substitutes, as well as model these expectations yourself. After all, you want to send the message that collaborating with your school is more than a transient assignment. Rather, your school is a welcoming community that honors and appreciates its substitutes’ contributions!

Take time to think about how you can intentionally and consistently receive feedback from staff, and then act upon it in visible ways. Even a simple follow-up message to thank a substitute for sharing their thoughts can go a long way in cultivating their engagement and trust.

Partner with supportive experts in modernized absence management

Improving absence and substitute management doesn’t have to be complicated; finding the right vendors and solutions can make it simple.

First, reflect on your existing absence management systems and tooling. What’s working? What’s causing greater pain or consuming more time than available? You can download and use our Absence Management Software Checklist to get this process started.

It’s also important to look for warning signs among the many K12 vendors available in the absence and substitute management space. Things like long-term contracts and “all-inclusive” platforms require additional scrutiny and caution! This worksheet can help you suss out which vendors make the best partners.

Solutions like Red Rover are easy to set up and even easier for everyone to use. We pride ourselves on supporting smooth absence management implementations in four weeks or less. We prioritize simplicity of use as we design each part of our solutions, too, so that anyone can easily learn how to navigate the systems.

Better still, Red Rover is also highly responsive and collaborative as a vendor partner. And that testament isn’t coming from us — hear for yourself from the hundreds of relieved administrators saving time, energy, and resources with our modernized workforce solutions.

Red Rover Helps Educators Streamline Substitute Coverage

Holistic absence management and strategic substitute coverage don’t occur in a vacuum. As the adage goes, it “takes a village” not only to help each student thrive but also to ensure that the adult team teaching them thrives, too. And that includes you as a district or school administrator responsible for the well-being of your K12 workforce.

Discover why 1,200+ districts have switched to Red Rover and how we support administrators like you in achieving their goals with substitute coverage and fill rates.