One month into school, Philly is shifting teachers around. But the ‘leveling’ this year isn’t because of money woes.

Four weeks into the school year, and because it enrolled nine fewer students than projected, Gloria Casarez Elementary in Kensington lost a teacher to leveling, the Philadelphia School District process of shifting educators to reflect actual enrollment.

That triggered a chain reaction a month after students had already settled in: The Casarez Spanish teacher had to move to cover special education, and a counselor moved in to cover the hole left in the specials schedule. Now, one of its counselors spends most of her day teaching classes in the neighborhood school where the effects of the opioid crisis and gun violence are everywhere, and student needs are significant.

“Leveling undermines the work that we’re trying to do,” said Julio Nuñez, Casarez’s assistant principal, of the process that wrapped up Oct. 3. “It’s not just a teaching position, it’s everything around it — the trust we lose with families, the impact on morale with teachers, the impact on the scheduling, on other people who provide services.”

Leveling has been a controversial exercise in Philadelphia for as long as anyone can remember. It’s a practice that’s not specific to the district, but it’s also not common elsewhere. District officials say it’s necessary to make sure its finite resources are best used; critics say it is unnecessary and disruptive, especially to vulnerable children, and a practice that isn’t considered in better-resourced systems.

It works like this: Say School A has a bumper crop of students with 30 more than expected enrolled. But 20 fewer students than anticipated enroll at School B. One teacher would leave School B and go to School A. (The alternative would be to leave smaller class sizes at School B, and hire an extra teacher for School A.)

In the past, leveling was about money, but that’s not the case this year: Federal dollars enabled the district to halt leveling in the 2021-22 school term, and that money is still available.

Now, it’s about people. The district cannot find and hire enough teachers to cover all its existing classroom vacancies in its 216 schools, and leveling is a way to shrink the number. (Philadelphia currently has 97.6% of its teaching jobs filled, meaning about 200 vacancies. Without leveling, 97% would be filled, officials said. Officials have declined to give exact numbers of vacancies, but assuming the district has about 9,000 teachers, that’s about 50 fewer positions that need to be filled.)

“We’re really trying to maximize the filled positions we have, increasing the number of students we have that have a certified, full-time teacher,” said Uri Monson, the district’s deputy superintendent for operations. “In an ideal world, we don’t have to do this, but this is the reality of what we’ve got.”

Now formally known as “enrollment-driven resource review” — a change officials said was not to rebrand, but to address a prior criticism that the term leveling wasn’t explicit enough — the practice is one the district takes very seriously, Monson said. Every proposed leveled position is reviewed by a team of people that includes academic experts and a representative from the district’s diversity, equity, and inclusion department.

Special consideration is given to schools with high vacancy rates, with poor academic performance, or serving high rates of English Language Learners, children with special needs, and those in transitional housing, he said.

“There’s a lot of effort that goes into it, to do with all those equity lenses in mind,” said Monson. “If you’re in a school that has trouble with hiring, we’re not going to move you.”

In a few cases, the district also added new assistant principals or counselors based on actual enrollment, Monson said.

This year, leveling meant 33 current teachers had to move from one building to another, Monson said. That’s less than one-quarter of 1% of the district’s teachers, he noted.

Among the affected group were teachers like Amy Roat, who taught ESL students full-time at George Washington Carver High School and now works half time at Carver and half at Dobbins High School.

Roat was pleased to land at Dobbins: “It’s a great school, and they need me,” she said.

But the process itself is a problem, said Roat.

“It’s not fair that they’re doing this,” she said. “They should already have found a full-time ESL teacher for Dobbins. They shouldn’t be scrounging for a teacher in October; that is a failure of the district.”

At Wagner Middle School in West Oak Lane, assistant principal Angela Crawford worked hard to recruit new staff this year. But leveling means that the school has lost a teacher, a real blow, Crawford said.

“Folks were in the building for a month, they established relationships,” said Crawford. Wagner lost its building substitute — technically a supplemental teacher without a classroom assignment, but in practice, that teacher had been covering a vacant class all year.

“Now, I have to take a brand-new teacher out of one content area and put them in another content area to keep them in the building,” Crawford said.

Schools are under enormous pressure to raise student achievement, but reshuffling this far into the school year has an impact, said Crawford.

“We want to talk about [professional development] and building relationships, but we don’t look at people, we look at numbers,” said Crawford. “And it’s our marginalized students who are getting hit and bombarded by all these shifts. Kids adapt over time, but how much impact does that have on their learning, when they already had deficits to begin with?”

Leveling, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan said, is “very difficult. Schools really cannot get into a smooth operation until they have their classes set, and children and teachers know what to expect. And it also causes teachers to leave the system.”

Nuñez, the Casarez assistant principal, who said he considers leveling a “racist, archaic” practice, agreed. He likened leveling to “moving teachers around like widgets, and that’s disrespectful, and it creates a serious disruption in the learning environment, particularly for our students who have experienced trauma.” Though the district is taking away positions, students’ needs don’t go away, Nuñez said.

Seventh grader Gwendolyn Roth took her concerns about leveling to the school board in September. Roth attends Kearny Elementary in Northern Liberties, which did not lose a teacher to leveling this year but often has in the past.

“Having enough teachers shouldn’t be a luxury,” Roth told the board. “COVID isn’t over. We’re still catching up. We can’t catch up if we don’t have teachers. We’re already behind, but by limiting our resources, you’re limiting our growth.”