Beginning Next School Year, Wake County Substitute Teachers Must Have a High School Diploma
Raleigh, N.C. — Beginning next school year, anyone hired as a substitute teacher in the Wake County Public School System must have a high school diploma. The school district previously required a diploma but removed the qualification in recent years after rewriting the job description.
“We don’t know if that removal was intentional or an oversight,” said Wake schools’ spokeswoman Lisa Luten. “Our HR department made the change to include the requirement back into the job description.”
Not requiring subs to have a high school diploma is highly unusual, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Um, what? You’re telling me that this school district has people teaching high school that have never graduated from high school? That’s a rather unorthodox strategy. And this isn’t some one horse town, either. This district has 160,000 students spread out across 187 schools. It is the largest district in the state of North Carolina and the 15th largest district in the country. And for the National Council on Teacher Quality to come out and say that not requiring subs to have a high school diploma is “highly unusual”, well this is a very bad look. You done messed up, Wake County.
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And I’m not necessarily saying their thinking is wrong. In fact, I tend to agree with it. Substitute teachers cannot get anything done in the classroom. You guys all remember how it was. An anarchy. Kids do not respect them, so teachers don’t have them actually “teach” anything while they’re there. They’re nothing more than a babysitter. So do they really need to be the cream of the crop? No. But it is such a bad look for the school district that you simply can’t roll with this decision. A high school diploma? We’re not talking college here, folks. We’re talking that they dropped out of school before the age of 18 because they couldn’t cut it with the normal people of this world. People that do not graduate high school are idiots.
Not surprisingly, people in the state of North Carolina (and on the internet) are unhappy. Valid points are being thrown all around, such as this being the type of ineptitude in public education that explains why schools are failing. I mean, how can we trust people to properly use tax funds when they’re making decisions like this? Bottom line: people need to be qualified for their job. Think about if all professions operated like this. Could you imagine having a doctor that never went to medical schools? Or a sportswriter that never played the game? Or a President that had never been in politics? People would have a field day. And while everyone is out in full force with their pitchforks, can someone please point out that we are building $60 million high school football stadiums but employing teachers that have never even graduated? I am disgusted!
