Absent Teacher Reserve

Absent Teacher Reserve is a term referring to teachers who have lost their daily teaching positions, but are reassigned to substitute for absent teachers at a school or number of schools within a school district or school system. It may also refer to assistant principals who are rotated from school to school in a similar fashion.

Job losses by ATR teachers are typically caused by ongoing school closings, phaseouts, and reorganizations to create new schools or allot space to charter schools. When a school is closed and immediately reopened as a smaller school or schools within a school building, experienced teachers must reapply for their jobs either in their former school building or elsewhere. ATR status can also be caused by elimination or lack of need for a particular teaching license. In addition, teachers removed for issues relating to job performance, or problematic issues, can wind up on ATR status (where it exists) due to legal agreement, decision, or binding arbitration.

The term is used today in the New York City Department of Education to describe teachers who wound up on ATR status for the above stated causes. Frequently, the teachers lost their positions because the New York City Department of Education closed their school. New York City, in recent years, closed many of its large middle and high schools in favor of smaller schools, offering up space to charter schools. The ATR teacher program developed from the 2005 contract between New York City and the United Federation of Teachers which eliminated seniority rights. A small minority of current and former ATR teachers were exonerated teachers who were formerly assigned to reassignment centers. The reassignment centers no longer exist.

Older teachers criticize the ATR program. They say that it is difficult to apply for a transfer to another school because they would have to receive higher salaries. For the most part, ATR teachers are on their own to locate a new position. Current teacher vacancies are posted on the New York City Department of Education's Open Market website.

ATR teachers rotate week to week from one school assignment to another within their school districts of tenure. They can work as an ATR teacher week to week in an assigned in-district school more than once in a school year, but not in consecutive weeks. An exception in the initial ATR teaching assignment, which is for the entire month of September only.

Several hundred assistant principals excessed from their administrative positions in the New York City Department of Education are also rotate to different schools in ATR status.

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