Substitute Teacher Crisis Hits Calgary Schools Hard
Nearly 200 teaching positions go unfilled daily in Calgary public schools as provincewide shortage forces classrooms to double up and principals to teach.
Calgary's classrooms are running on fumes. The Calgary Board of Education is struggling to fill roughly 200 substitute teaching positions every single day—a crisis that ripples through hallways, burnout rates, and student learning.
The numbers tell a grim story. In April, about 20 percent of substitute jobs in the CBE went unfilled; last year it was 16 percent. One substitute teacher counted 240 unfilled positions at 9 a.m. on a single morning, with seven openings at one elementary school alone. In smaller rural schools across Alberta, the shortage is even more brutal: principals are teaching classes themselves, staff members are doubling up, and prep time—the breathing room teachers desperately need—vanishes.
Why? The pandemic gutted the substitute teacher pool. Teachers who filled those gaps left the profession entirely during COVID and never came back. At the same time, Alberta Education just committed to hiring nearly 500 new teachers for new "complexity teams" designed to help struggling schools, followed by an announcement of 1,400 more teachers to reduce class sizes. That new hiring is pulling substitutes into full-time roles, deepening the immediate shortage.
Substitute teaching itself is brutal work: roughly $270 a day with no benefits, no guaranteed hours, and no pay during breaks. Most subs juggle side hustles just to make rent. You walk into a chaotic classroom with only the regular teacher's notes to guide you. The classroom management alone—especially in junior high—can take days to stabilize, but most assignments last only a day or two. Teachers say they're feeling guilty about calling in sick because they know there won't be coverage. Students are losing continuity. Entire school days are getting lost to coverage gaps.
The CBE is hiring hard, pulling from university graduates and recruiting wider. But Alberta isn't the only province hiring teachers right now, and young graduates have options. The shortage won't fix overnight, but it's already reshaping what a school day looks like in Calgary.