Teacher absences across Hawaii’s public schools are still higher than usual but continued to fall last week, mirroring the declining wave of the omicron variant of COVID-19.

For the school week of Jan. 31 through Friday, absent teachers statewide made an average of 1,500 requests per day for substitute teachers to temporarily fill in, according to state Department of Education data.

That was a 7% decrease from the week before, when there was an average of 1,621 requests for substitutes per day.

Teacher absences spiked dramatically earlier in the omicron surge, with requests for substitutes reaching a high of 2,159 on Jan. 14.

By comparison, in early December, before the surge, a more typical number of substitute teacher requests was about 1,300.

With so many teachers out and not enough substitutes signing up to cover the jobs across the state’s 257 public schools, some campuses had to recruit other staff to supervise students who were minus their regular teachers, and students at times were consolidated in other classrooms, cafeterias and auditoriums.

The temporary arrangements have drawn complaints from some educators, parents and the Hawaii State Teachers Association.

State interim schools Superintendent Keith Hayashi said Jan. 5 that while roughly half of the teachers calling out at that time were for sick leave, the remainder were for other reasons such as vacation and family leave.

For the Jan. 31 school week, there were 178 substitute teacher jobs unfilled on average per day. That was down 31% from the week of Jan. 24, when there were 259 substitute jobs unfilled on average per day.

The DOE says it has approximately 13,000 teachers statewide and a pool of 3,922 substitute teachers available.