What Administrative Support Do Teachers Actually Need? An Honest Look From A Classroom Parent Volunteer
I was folding book order flyers at the back of my 4th grader’s classroom last month, 20 minutes after the final bell rang, when Ms. Lopez, our teacher, dropped her pen and leaned back in her chair with a sigh so deep it made the empty coffee mug on her desk rattle. I asked if she was okay. She nodded at her laptop screen, where half a dozen tabs were open to different district websites, each asking for the same 10 pieces of information about a 9-year-old student who qualified for a new free and reduced lunch program. “I’ve been at this for an hour and a half,” she said. “I still haven’t graded the reading journals your kid turned in on Tuesday. I don’t even have time to write the feedback they’re waiting for.”
I’ve volunteered in this classroom for two semesters, so I’ve seen the slow pile-up of work that doesn’t involve teaching. Back in the fall, she spent two full prep periods (that’s 3 hours total, for those who don’t know) entering permission slip information for our spring field trip. First, she entered every name and signature into a shared Google sheet for the PTA. Then she re-entered all the same information into the district’s locked field trip portal, because the two systems don’t sync. Then she emailed the final list twice to the front office, because the first email got lost in a shared inbox that three different people check once a day. By the time she was done, she had to push back the unit on climate change she was excited to teach because she didn’t have time to put together the experiment stations.
Most parents I talk to assume administrative support for teachers means extra hands to cut out bulletin board letters or grade multiple choice tests. Those things are nice, but they’re not what teachers actually spend the majority of their uncompensated after-hours time on. Ms. Lopez told me that on an average week, she works about 10 hours outside of contracted time, and 7 of those hours go to administrative tasks, not lesson planning or grading. She’s not an outlier; every teacher I’ve talked to at our school says the same thing. The front office only has two administrative assistants for 320 kids, and one of them is part-time, so almost all individual student admin falls back to the classroom teacher.
That got me thinking: what can we actually do about this, right now, that doesn’t require a huge district budget overhaul? I started asking other parents and teachers for small, concrete changes that would make a difference, and most of the answers are things anyone can do, starting this week.
For parents, the first and easiest thing is to turn in any form or request the day you get it. I know that sounds too small to matter, but Ms. Lopez says she spends 2 hours every single week just following up with parents who haven’t turned in permission slips, health forms, or directory updates. If 80% of parents turned in their forms within 48 hours, that’s an hour and a half a week she gets back to do small reading groups with kids who are struggling. If you’re a class volunteer, instead of offering “let me know if you need anything,” offer a specific task that cuts down on admin work. Instead of asking to cut laminating, ask “can I spend an hour this week entering all the permission slip data into the district portal for you?” Our PTA just updated our volunteer sign-up form last month to add these kinds of admin-focused tasks, and we’ve already had a dozen parents sign up. It’s not hard for someone who knows how to use a spreadsheet to knock it out in an hour after work, and it frees the teacher up to do work that only they can do.
For school leaders and district administrators, the changes are just as concrete. Stop requiring teachers to enter the same information into three different disconnected systems. If your district has outdated software that doesn’t talk to each other, assign one part-time admin to do bulk data entry for all teachers instead of making every teacher do their own. When you add a new reporting requirement, take an old one away. A lot of districts add new monthly check-ins or progress reports without getting rid of the old biweekly reports that are already collecting the same data. I talked to one teacher at our school who had to write a 10-page district reading progress report last month that used almost the exact same data she already put into report cards two weeks prior. That’s three evenings of work after her own kids went to bed, for no reason.
I won’t lie and say this solves all the problems teachers face. We still have underpaid staff, oversized classes, and a district bureaucracy that moves slower than molasses. The big changes, like updating all our old software to sync with each other, are going to take time and money that the district hasn’t committed to yet. A lot of the underlying issues are rooted in underfunding that goes back decades, and there’s no quick fix for that.
But right now, Ms. Lopez has gotten 6 extra hours of teaching time a month just from parents taking a few small admin tasks off her plate. Last week, she told me she got to do 15 minute one-on-one check-ins with every kid in her class, something she hasn’t had time to do all semester. One of my kid’s classmates, who has been quiet and struggling with anxiety since his parents split up, got to talk for 10 minutes about what’s been bothering him, something that never would have happened if Ms. Lopez was stuck doing data entry all prep period. It’s not a perfect fix, and there’s still so much that needs to change. But it’s a start. Some days, that’s all you can ask for.
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