Other Duties as Assigned

BY STEVE NUZUM

For at least the final five years of my teaching career, I was very concerned about the preponderance of “other duties” districts placed on teachers and other school staff.  (I was invested enough in the issue that I named my newsletter after the concept of “other duties as assigned”.) 

Some “other duties” seem reasonable. If you’re a classroom teacher, it seems reasonable to expect that you might attend at least one parent-teacher night per semester, that you might attend professional development, that you might make time to give feedback on student projects. 

Others are less reasonable. When a Cherokee Schools teacher sued her district in 2019 for requiring her to work at the concession stand and to make gift baskets for fundraisers, she had a point. After all, the district hired her to teach students, not to make gift baskets or sell snacks. 

Unfortunately, the law in this area is somewhat unclear. When I spoke to a labor attorney Grant LeFever few years ago, she told me, “if the ‘other duties’ assigned were so numerous and of such a nature that the employee’s “primary duty” no longer could be considered “teaching, tutoring, instructing or lecturing in the activity of imparting knowledge,” then that employee may not qualify for the FLSA  [Fair Labor Standards Act] teacher exemption and thus be entitled to a minimum hourly wage and overtime pay.

“Beyond these two potential FLSA arguments, I am not aware of any established or reasonable expectations that limit the kinds of duties districts could assign.”

This is not legal advice, but I take it to mean that some excessive “other duties” are possibly unlawful, while others are not.  But unlawful or not, many educators and educational experts argue that even if districts can legally get away with piling more and more work on the people who work in schools, there always comes a time to pay the piper when more and more people quit working in schools, and fewer and fewer replacements can be found.

So why do schools do this? 

Some “other duties” are a product of states underfunding of schools.  

South Carolina has historically underfunded schools even according to the modest legal requirements laid out in the state’s own Education Finance Act of 1977. The law requires the General Assembly to write a budget each year which fully funds the “base student cost” for all public school students, an amount calculated to meet “the funding level necessary for providing a minimum foundation program which includes the funding level necessary for supporting the defined minimum program and to meet, as funds are available, needs identified by each district board of trustees' annual report, which reflects the needs identified in the annual school reports of the district and other assessments.” 

According to data from the SC Office of Revenue and Fiscal Affairs, “base student cost” has not been fully funded since 2007, and has been fully funded in only eight of the thirty-three years since 1989, the earliest year for which RFA provided data.

A few years ago, the state changed the funding formula to be more “flexible” in terms of defining how state aid to classrooms could be spent, but that didn’t change the fact that many districts did not have enough revenue to fully staff schools, to keep class sizes low, or to keep teachers and other employees from having to take on additional work

And while they sometimes act out of necessity, many school districts have also gotten too comfortable asking teachers and other employees to do things they shouldn’t be asking them to do. A former superintendent in Richland County once told me that he felt a then-new law requiring that teachers have a minimum of 30 minutes of unencumbered time (something I had, as a matter of policy, even when I was a cashier at Bi-Lo during college), would upset what he called a fragile “house of cards” whose foundation was the work teachers regularly did outside of their normal duties. 

These additional duties take their toll on teachers, and contribute to burnout and low morale.  

As I’ve argued in the past, teacher exhaustion and burnout are not only bad for individual teachers and their students, but they drive attrition and scare potential new teachers away from entering the profession.

Perhaps that’s why Representative Neal Collins and three cosponsors in the SC House introduced H. 3210 last year. That bill, which was ultimately referred to the House Education and Public Works committee, would require that “A teacher may not be required to perform extracurricular duties, regardless of compensation, as an express or implied condition for employment.” 

That bill, perhaps unsurprisingly, didn’t get a lot of attention in the South Carolina General Assembly last session.  

Many legislators were far more concerned with passing an unconstitutional school voucher bill, arguing about “DEI,” and promoting other politicized talking points about schools in lieu of solving the real problems facing students, families, and teachers. (I helped ProTruth South Carolina to compile lists of pre-filed legislation to watch for during the last session and for the current session, which give a pretty clear picture of the priorities of the legislature. As the current session gets going, legislative priorities include prohibiting transgender and nonbinary students from using the restrooms of their choice and refining the language of the aforementioned unconstitutional voucher law.) 

School employees have been warning us about “other duties as assigned” for years.

In March 2021, I surveyed over 1,400 South Carolina teachers on behalf of SC for Ed. 56% of those who responded said they were required to act as substitute teachers at least once a week (with over 300 saying they had to cover three or more times per week). It is probably no coincidence that over 38% of teachers surveyed that year said they planned to leave their current position. 

One survey participant shared, “All teachers are regularly asked to cover classes every day (as are guidance counselors, librarians, etc). Burnout is causing more and more people to need to miss work.” 

Another simply shared, “This can not continue. You are going to lose everyone and we are way too overworked.”

A third shared, “Teachers have been required for the last two school years to begin watching kids in their classrooms the moment they enter the building. This equates to an extra 40 minutes a day of supervision. It is exhausting.” 

And it wasn’t only teachers who reported feeling burned out by extra duties.  One school secretary shared that she had “no teacher or substitute training, but I am asked to cover classes, both instruction and ‘study hall’ daily for teachers that are out or that have to attend IEP/504 meetings… As a support staff member, it’s considered ‘other duties as defined’”.

While there have been small improvements in educator retention, the big picture hasn’t changed.

These responses came during one of the most stressful periods for educators during the height of the pandemic, but South Carolina’s teacher recruitment and retention problems haven’t significantly improved during the intervening years. During the 2021-22 school year, the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement (CERRA) reported 1,278 departures from the profession; during the 2024-25 school year, it reported 1,250. 

And as I shared in the prior piece about education staff burnout, “A recent [2022] report from the RAND Foundation found that, “More teachers and principals than other working adults reported symptoms of depression and not coping well with their job related stress. More teachers than other working adults reported burnout, and about half as many teachers reported feeling resilient to stressful events compared with other working adults.” 

As I also explained in that piece, “The same study found that ‘In January 2022, about one-third of teachers and principals reported that they were likely to leave their current teaching or principal job by the end of the 2021–2022 school year,’ and that educators’ intention to leave the profession was significantly correlated with feelings of stress and burnout.”

Even if some of the stress of the early pandemic might have faded, the ongoing political and cultural battles that place teachers and students in the middle haven’t.  Current South Carolina legislative priorities represent broad talking points in a war on public schools, painting them falsely as hotbeds of indoctrination (and presenting alternate histories and overtly politicized curricular materials as the supposed cure), attacking organizations that advocate for teachers, librarians, and students, and, ultimately, trying to replace them with for-profit educational providers, unaccountable “alternative” schools, and private religious organizations, none of which must answer to the public for either the content they teach or the outcomes for students.  

What can we do?

Passing legislation like H. 3210, which requires districts to tell teachers up front what they will be expected to do, and which prohibits them from making non-teaching duties a requirement of employment, would be a powerful step in the right direction in districts which are currently operating under the “house of cards” mentality-- that is, districts which can probably afford to reduce school employee duties but which are locked in the mindset that the system runs on “other duties as assigned”. 

But in order to address the issues in poorer districts, the state will also have to step up and provide the resources necessary to hire staff and recruit volunteers to do some of those extra duties. The state legislature, after all, passed Act 388, which dramatically slashed local property tax revenue for school districts. The state legislature chose not to fully fund the Education Finance Act in almost every year since its passage. 

And it must be the state legislature which makes it possible for every district to recruit and retain more teachers and other vital school staff by taking some of the extra duties off of their plates.  

The reality is that teaching will still be a difficult and stressful job.  The classroom already requires a huge amount of energy, time, and physical, emotional, and intellectual labor. 

But maybe by freeing teachers up from unwanted shifts at the concession stand, or from day after day covering for absent staff members, or from doing daily lunch duty in addition to teaching and planning without breaks all day, we could persuade more people that teaching is a worthwhile and sustainable profession.