The Williamsville Central School District has had to indefinitely delay the opening of the year for middle and high schoolers.

The reason? Ninety teachers taking leaves of absence, 111 resigning, and 80 unfilled vacancies for strictly online teachers due to high uptake by students and their parents.

I care because this is where I did all of my K-12 schooling, and where my Dad worked from 1970 to 1991 (he was a low level administrator in the district office). It's also where my niece teaches (although she's on routine leave for a bit).

For perspective, this is also the largest suburban district for the second largest city in the state. 

I'm ballparking here. I just looked at my high school yearbook, and there were 49 teachers. I went to the smallest of the 3 high schools in the district, so 220 sounds like a good number for the total number of high school teachers. And if that's 4 out of 13 years, I'm guesstimating that there are 715 teachers in the district in total. So, 1 out every 8 took leave, 2 out of every 13 resigned, and for every 9 teachers from last year they still have 1 online opening. I have a hard time imagining what my high school would have been like if over the summer 6 teachers had taken leave, 8 had retired, and they were will looking for 9 more to cover something like 40 uncovered classes. Yikes.