What’s it Really Costing You to Leave That Position Unfilled?

Whizara
Jul 19
4 min read

Updated: Jul 25

If you’ve been staring at an unfilled teaching position on your master schedule for weeks (or months), you are not alone.

Nationwide, school leaders are grappling with teacher shortages that show no signs of slowing down. Movers and leavers are on the rise, with a dwindling supply of new educators entering the pool.

Some positions remain open all year, creating a huge impact on your current staff, who have to carry the load. Others are filled with long-term substitutes on rotation, which puts pressure on department heads and administration to provide curriculum and learning materials, often which is equated to “busy work” for students.

But here’s the real question that most districts fail to ask:

What is it really costing you to leave that position unfilled?

Spoiler alert: it’s costing more than a teacher salary. Let’s break it down.

Student Learning Loss Adds Up Fast

Research shows time and again that highly qualified educators dramatically increase learning gains. The opposite applies as well. A lack of quality instruction leads to an educational debt that cannot easily be erased. What does this mean for your budget?

More classes are required to provide remedial courses for each subject.
Increased demand for tutoring, taking away instructor time to prioritize remediation over electives, planning, enrichment, and advancement.
A rise in disciplinary issues and administration involvement, as students are either lost or bored from the lack of consistent content from highly qualified educators.
Lowered test scores, leading to a loss of grants and funding.

Teacher Burnout Adds Up Faster

Every “temporary coverage plan” is a strain on your existing staff. That strain does not get repaired on teacher appreciation week, or at an end of school bbq.

Whether it’s an extra prep period, larger class sizes, combined classes, or shared duties across grades, your strongest teachers are quietly shouldering the burden.

Do not expect them to complain out loud before there is a problem. Teachers want to teach. They will often give their all until they are unable to keep up with the demand, at which point it is too late.

Every additional role, unpaid supervisorial duty, after-school program, or extra demand added to classroom teaching creates a higher risk for burnout and attrition. Instead of spending the money to hire the additional staff you need now, you may find yourself spending double the budget to lose your strongest teachers after they gave their all to support the extra demand.

Not only is turnover costly, it also takes your most experienced educators. This means more time training and developing new teacher replacements, on top of the heavy toll of attrition.

Avoid the burnout! Staff your school with Whizara’s innovating virtual educator marketplace today.

School Climate and Morale Take a Hit

An unattended staff shortage sends a message to all of your staff.

When teachers see unfilled positions, subs rotated through, or overloaded schedules as the norm, they quickly lose trust in your ability to support them.

This has a devastating impact across your school’s culture. You will see it in:

Increased staff complaints and HR issues
A lack of collaboration amongst teachers and between faculty and staff
The loss of new hires who don’t feel supported or trained
Issues from parents who feel unsupported, leading to lower enrollment and funding

Substitute Costs Quietly Add Up

While you lose time that could be spent with a highly qualified educator in the classroom, you also spend much more than expected on substitute coverage.

Long-term substitutes are not free. Neither are the additional stipends, coverages, and schedule manipulation needed to make your school calendar move forward.

Some districts have found themselves spending more on patchwork staffing than they would have on a direct hire. That financial pain doesn’t even account for the lack of instructional impact that they receive in return.

Remember, every hour that a substitute is in the room, there is additional work for hiring and vetting them, creating and deploying curriculum for them, and managing the LMS and manually entering attendance for them. It creates more work than simply what happens in the classroom.

The Opportunity Cost is Invisible, but Enormous

Do not forget about the things that are NOT happening due to being short-staffed. The opportunity cost adds up as much as your actual budget. Here are some opportunity costs that may go missed:

The elective program that you wanted to roll out or that your students have been begging for for years.
The after-school tutoring plan that would make your school a stellar success.
The grant that you could not apply for because you simply did not have the staff necessary to roll out the program, no matter how beneficial it may have been.
The special education assistance needed to ensure every iep is individualized and all ESE students are supported, leading to gains in this crucial aspect of education.

Want to See the Actual Numbers?

We built a budget calculator just for you! It’s important to see what it actually costs to staff your school the way you always dreamed.

Sometimes, schools leave a vacancy because it does not make sense to hire. For example, would you hire a math teacher just because you had one period of a math course needed to fill? No, you would likely push it onto a teacher as a supplement or hire a long-term substitute.

With Whizara, you now have a third, better option. You can hire a virtual educator to teach that one course. At a fair price, you get a certified, highly qualified educator who is capable of creating their own curriculum or incorporating yours. They can operate on your LMS, participate in PD’s, and maintain your school’s culture, all without having to be a full-time hire.

The process is easy. You just input your subject needs, your preferred experience level and certification requirements, and in seconds you will see the cost!