Green Bay Reporter

Josh Patchak, Green Bay Area School District chief operations officer, is sounding the alarm about a support staff positions shortage that some fear could come to impact students and teachers alike.

“This is much more challenging than years prior,” Patchak told WLUK this week.

Support staff positions include custodians, teacher’s aides and lunchroom workers. School officials also noted that one of the biggest challenges has been recruiting enough paraprofessionals to work with the kids of greatest need.

With starting pay for most of the district positions ranging from $17 to $20 an hour, administrators said they even started contacting parents of school children directly to make them aware of the openings in an effort to get any interested parties involved.

In all, the Green Bay Area School District currently counts approximately 96 job openings remaining, and while many of them are of the support-staff variety and not teaching staff, all vacancies are widely viewed as adversely impacting teachers based on the way they mean more responsibilities and less planning and break time for them, running the risk of more burnt out and overworked educators.

"Normally, they would have a monitor taking care of supervising those students while the teachers are taking their break," Patchak told WLUK. "Well, now the teacher has to fill in at the lunch room, and some teachers may not get a lunch break during the day or even a bathroom break.”