The majority of Meghan Witty’s past three years in the Omaha Public Schools were filled with exhaustion, sacrifice and uncertainty as working conditions deteriorated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She started teaching social studies at North High School in 2019. By the end of 2020, with staff shortages hurting the school, she had taken on additional responsibilities, becoming an AP teacher, dance coach and speech coach.
She said she had less than half of her plan time the entire 2021-22 school year. Just a few months ago, before what would be her last days at North, she had an anxiety attack so severe that paramedics thought it was a heart attack. She returned to school that Monday, because “there were no substitutes.”
Witty was one of more than 70 teachers who recently learned they’re being reassigned to other buildings as the district tries to address its staff shortage. OPS officials have said that with more than 200 unfilled positions across the district, the reassignments are necessary to help ensure each classroom has a teacher.
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While reassignments happen every year, Robert Miller, president of the Omaha Education Association, said the district’s method of selecting and notifying teachers for reassignment was “questionable.”
“When we had discussed with OPS, they did tell us that there will be reassignments based on student numbers. We asked for a deadline to be met, so (reassignments) didn’t mess with summer school and for teachers to be compensated,” he said. “Sadly, they pulled notifying teachers in the middle of the summer.”
Some reassigned teachers have said they didn’t know they were going to be moved until they received a phone call from OPS human resources out of the blue with their new school for the 2022-23 year.
“The only reason I knew it was coming is because teachers spread rumors faster than high schoolers. I said, ‘No, I teach four different classes, how are they going to replace me?’” Witty said. “Getting the call on July 1 ... it destroyed me.”
After 22 years in OPS and 17 years at Buffett Middle School, Andy Staberg received a call June 30 from a district official who told him that he was being reassigned to Monroe Middle School. A physical education teacher at Monroe said earlier this year that the school lost more than 60% of its staff after teachers transferred or resigned this spring.
Staberg, a technology teacher, had just been hired as Buffett’s assistant boys basketball coach in June and worked summer school that month “without a thought” of being reassigned, he said. He had started at Buffett in 2005 after he was reassigned from Monroe, but he said that process was completely different.
“We were informed that they were going to have to cut a team of teachers because they weren’t going to have enough students,” he said, recalling his reassignment in 2005. “They brought in the seventh grade teams of teachers and went through this process with us. Based on what the reaction of some of the veteran teachers were, being newer, I offered to transfer because I didn’t want to force someone to leave who doesn’t want to go.”
Miller said this process is how he has experienced reassignments: Building principals will meet with the grade level team that needs to cut numbers and will ask for volunteers first. Sometimes decisions were based on seniority, he said.
Charles Wakefield, chief operations officer for OPS, told school board members at a June 6 meeting that the process would be similar, even though it’s more difficult to reassign secondary teachers based on their certifications.
“As we go through that in high school especially, you start getting into certifications. ‘Well, I was fully staffed math but as I reduce sections, I don’t need this math teacher.’ So then HR would come in and talk to the math teachers, seek their input, seek principal input, ask for volunteers first and then work with them to assign them to a school that does need a math teacher,” he said at the meeting. “It is heavily involved with communication, it’s heavily involved with input, both the principal and the teacher level.”
Board member Margo Juarez told Wakefield she was concerned that forcing teachers to move to a different school could impact staff morale.
“I do hope that it does work out that teachers are going to be able to volunteer and that maybe we’re going to have a sufficient number to make the changes that we need, but I am concerned about it being forced upon them,” she said at the meeting.
Juarez said she hopes that if a teacher is forced to leave a school, that the district would be flexible with them in the future and might even let them return to that school if staffing improves.
“We actually have done that in the past, and we’ll continue to do that,” Wakefield said at the meeting.
In an interview with The World-Herald, Wakefield said elementary reassignments did go through a process in which officials asked for volunteers. But because middle school and high school teachers are so specialized, it “became much more difficult to ask for volunteers.”
He said it was up to building principals to choose how they wanted to handle the reassignment process and each principal approached it differently. He said that while some asked for volunteers, others worked with teacher leaders, deans or curriculum specialists to identify who would move.
This year is also different because reassignments are happening on a much larger scale than normal, he said.
“Principals worked with groups of staff, but they didn’t necessarily talk with the staff that were being reassigned. But they did work in a collaborative process to try to best identify schedules as they went forward,” he said. “And teachers knew this was happening. But I fully understand that you never expect that phone call to come to you. We all think that we’re OK, that it’s going to happen to somebody else. And it’s a shock to get that call. That’s why we want to support teachers.”
Amanda Leet, who had been at OPS for 14 years and was a reading teacher before being reassigned, said her principal didn’t know she was going to leave before she got the call.
Leet was reassigned from Bryan High School to McMillan Middle School after receiving a “cold call” from OPS human resources. She chose to resign.
“I want to make sure that it’s super clear, because some people are just pissed that they’re having to move to a low-income school, but I am not,” she said. “I am pissed at how they continue to treat their employees who are dedicated and … are there because they want to be, which, if you’ve been in a school, you know that is priceless.”
Leet said she wouldn’t have resigned if she had been treated differently in the reassignment process. She said the only communication she’s received from the district is about her certification, which could be suspended since she resigned after the district’s deadline.
OPS is allowed to reassign teachers to different locations, according to this year’s contract. If a teacher resigns after the resignation deadline, which was earlier this spring, the district has to report it as a breach of contract, Wakefield said.
He said the Nebraska Department of Education then decides if the contract was actually breached and what discipline, if any, should be assigned. A teacher’s certification could be suspended for a year or more.
Though he hasn’t resigned, Staberg said the situation makes him feel like he’s just a number.
“There are dates you have to resign by, dates if you want to retire, you have to submit paperwork by a certain date,” he said. “You have to do all these things by certain dates and if you don’t, you’re stuck. And not having this (reassignment) information before now, I am now stuck.”
Wakefield said he doesn’t anticipate there will be any more reassignments before the start of the school year. The number of reassignments is still in the range of 70-75, he said.
It’s normal for some teachers to be reassigned once school starts and student enrollment numbers become official. He said the district is trying to “work with teachers to help them through this process.”
“We understand that frustration, we get it. I would be frustrated, too,” he said. “We want to support our teachers. But ultimately, we have to meet the needs of our students. So that’s the most important thing we do each and every day.”
Miller said the teachers union is trying to secure compensation for the teachers who were reassigned to help with relocation expenses.
“This is disruptive and disconnecting because teachers have relationships with their school community,” Miller said. “Students and school environments will be negatively impacted.”