Michigan's Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who flip-flopped into supporting vaccine mandates just a few days ago, now recognizes a severe staffing shortage for schoolteachers.  Her solution?  Signing into law permission for other school employees to teach in their place.  John Rigolizzo reports in the Daily Wire:

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed a bill into law that would attempt to alleviate a growing shortage of teachers in the state by allowing school staff to serve as substitutes.

Michigan House Bill 4294 "will temporarily allow schools to employ an individual without certification who already works at the school to substitute teach through the end of the 2021–2022 school year," the governor's office said in a press release Monday announcing the signing. That includes school staff such as secretaries, office staff, teacher's aides, library aides, and even cafeteria workers and bus drivers, as long as they have a high school diploma or GED, FOX 2 Detroit reported. 

Wait a minute!  We are told that school bus drivers already in such short supply that in some states National Guard troops have been called up as fill-ins.  If Whitmer re-purposes bus drivers as teachers, will she have to start calling out the Guard to replace them?  Why not save trouble and just call out the Guard to teach?

Whitmer is also challenging the new gospel of the left: that teachers — or as they like to term them, "educators" — are the only people to qualify for designing curricula.  The all-powerful (in the Democrat party) teachers' unions certainly think teachers are special breed apart, possessed of superior wisdom unfathomable to those who didn't attend a school of education.

No less an authority figure than Nikole Hannah-Jones is the latest to stress how important a B.A. degree in social studies is in figuring out what the next generation should be taught:

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Parents shouldn't be in charge of their kids' schooling: "I don't really understand this idea that parents should decide what's being taught. I'm not a professional educator. I don't have a degree in social studies." Yet she wants the 1619 Project in schools. pic.twitter.com/UAjFTCvVmg

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) December 26, 2021

And what, pray tell, if some of those cafeteria workers, bus drivers, and office staff are parents?  Former Democrat governor Terry McAuliffe joins Professor Hannah-Jones in decrying the idea that parents should have any say in what takes place in the classroom.

Will Whitmer exclude the parents among the staff from serving in the classroom?

Photo credit: Julia  Pickett, CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

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