Dave: Hey everyone, Dave here with another episode of the Philly Tech Connect podcast, representing Philly Tech entrepreneurs. I’ve got my friend Donovan Forest here. Donovan is the CEO and founder of SubFinder. He brings a unique perspective from his teaching experience about prioritizing student achievement and support, and now going out and building SubFinder, which is going to provide an innovative staffing solution. It’s going to connect schools with qualified, diverse substitute teachers. We’re going to be talking about teaching in general in Philadelphia, the project that he’s working on. Donovan, how are you doing today?
Donovan: How’s it going, Dave? I’m doing pretty good.
Dave: I’m good man. Really appreciate you came to our startup pitch event like two weeks ago or so, introduced SubFinder to the audience. So really cool to kind of meet your acquaintance there and start talking about what you’re doing. You have a teaching background, if I’m not mistaken, perhaps teaching at the moment, I’m not sure. So tell me a little bit about your history in that area.
Donovan: Yep, no problem, and thank you also for having me on your podcast. So a little bit about me, I grew up in Philadelphia, Philadelphia born and raised, went through Philadelphia public schools, and ended up graduating with a degree in secondary education and social studies from Temple University in May 2020. And I started teaching in the pandemic, you know, my substitute teacher experience was kind of cut short in March 2020 because of the Covid shutdowns. And you know, my first year was really just virtual. Ultimately, from September of 2020 to around like March, April 2021, when we started to actually return to the classroom while social distancing. So a lot of my experience in education as a teacher, as a pre-service teacher, was during the pandemic. And I taught that first year ELA at a charter school and took a break to go to grad school for a year, and then taught again, this time in Camden. I taught high school social studies. And during that time, I really realized the need for support amongst teachers in schools in general because teachers ultimately, while they have a very important job, sometimes more support is actually needed. A lot of teachers are getting burned out. So with SubFinder, that mission of that company is to support teachers by providing qualified, diverse subs in their place so that they can take their PTO days guilt-free.
Dave: Gotcha. So tell me a little bit more about support. So it sounds like, you know, the way you’re referring to it, you’re talking about another abled body to be able to fill in when they need. Tell me a little bit more about the various types of support that teachers can get or aren’t getting and need.
Donovan: Yeah, so I think my idea of support as a teacher actually stems from my experience as a differently abled first-year teacher during the pandemic. A little bit about what I was dealing with, in addition to just like, you know, CO shutdowns, social distancing, teaching from home, I also have a chronic disorder. So that was kind of triggered by stress, and the stress of the pandemic kind of contributed to me having to take days off from staring into the computer and actually doing the day-to-day tasks that a teacher does. And because of those days that I took off, a lot of the support that I received were from my colleagues; it wasn’t necessarily a substitute from a substitute teacher agency that was stepping in and covering my classes. My students, if I wasn’t in the classroom once we got back to the actual school building, they would have to go to the auditorium, and an API or assistant principal of instruction would cover the class. Or my students who were that came back into the building would be merged with another class. And I realized that while I couldn’t necessarily control what was going on in my life, our students still suffered academically. And you know, educational continuity for students is very important. And so with that, the substitute, you know, the people that covered my classes being my colleagues, you know, they’re teachers as well, so they were overworked, oftentimes overwhelmed because of not only the experiences that they had but also just the daily day-to-day work of being a teacher. And I realized that it wasn’t necessarily fair because my colleagues were supportive, and I realized that if there’s anything that I could do to kind of innovate and support schools, teachers, and students, I thought that SubFinder would be that solution to that problem.
Dave: Right. So I guess if I understand correctly, the way you’re describing it is let’s say you’re out, colleagues covering your shift, then maybe giving up like a free period or something of their own, or maybe giving up a day that they were going to have off, perhaps. But sounds like, yeah, maybe they’re giving up free periods and things like that. Is the problem like a lack of available substitute teachers, or is it just like a disconnect in the way that we organize, you know, fill in the gap? Like what’s kind of the issue there?
Donovan: Yeah, so, you know, Pennsylvania in particular is dealing with a teacher shortage, you know, and also a teacher attrition crisis. So because of the work environments, teachers aren’t returning at alarming rates at the end of the school year, from one school year to another school year. So that’s causing districts expenses and trying to onboard new teachers. Teacher attrition costs districts millions per year. And I think it’s important that teachers really aren’t overworked. You know, like there was a teacher shortage, but there’s also a substitute teacher shortage, especially in states like Pennsylvania. So it costs districts money to hire substitutes, and because of that shortage, a lot of teachers that were already employees or working in the building had to cover to save the schools money. So there was that shortage of teachers, shortage of subs, districts and school organizations are trying to save money. So ultimately, there wasn’t enough support in the classroom.
Dave: Got it. So where does SubFinder kind of fit into this model? How, you know, and I know you’re in early stages right now, I think you’ve done some concepting, some designs. How do you imagine it’s going to function?
Donovan: Yeah, so, you know, we have like two public-facing platforms. There’s SubFinder.org, our website, and then there’s GuestEDU, which is our absence management, a beta prototype of an application, an absence management application for K-through-12 administrators and guest educators that will be working at SubFinder. So, for example, if a school administrator or a district administrator wants to partner with SubFinder in the future, they would go through our website, scroll down where it says for schools, and just fill out a form. The form should take about a minute. Once they submit that, somebody from our team will reach out within 24 hours and figure out what the needs of the school are and try to meet that need by providing a subpool. Once we like kind of like sign that contract, we would charge a premium to the districts, to the schools, and we would pay our subs a percentage of that daily rate. And ultimately, once that partnership is realized, GuestEDU, which is our absence management platform, will allow K-through-12 administrators to input teacher absences up to two months in advance, and then our guest educators will have push notifications active, and they would be able to accept those assignments as they come in.
Dave: Awesome. So, yeah, kind of building a marketplace to just reduce the friction and I guess teacher, you know, taking on an opportunity and allowing it to, you know, the market to kind of work itself out. What are some of your guys’ upcoming milestones? What can we look forward to next for SubFinder?
Donovan: Yeah, so, you know, I think one thing that I wanted to put out there is that SubFinder differs from other substitute teacher staffing agencies because of our, I guess, emphasis is on staffing ESL, so English as a Second Language, STEM subjects, and special education classes. That’s our specialty; we’ll specialize in staffing classrooms within those subjects. But moving forward, you know, we plan to launch in September of next year, or sometime during the 2024-2025 school year. So once that happens and we partner with a small pilot of schools, we’ll officially be on the ground, boots on the ground, working to staff these hard-to-reach classrooms. And, you know, ultimately spreading throughout Pennsylvania and hopefully in other states.
Dave: Awesome, man. Well, we’re looking forward to that launch and obviously hoping we can do anything to support you along the way and improve the state of teaching and guest teaching in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania beyond. For people that want to get in touch, learn more about what you’re doing, where should they go?
Donovan: Yeah, so K-through-12 administrators, anybody that’s just interested in the work that we do, our platform on our website is www.SubFinder.org. So that’s SubFinder without the ER, it’s just SUBFIND and R. And you can email us at hello@SubFinder.org, and also our social media is @SubFinder. So.
Dave: Awesome. Thanks so much for being on the show, Donovan.
Donovan: No problem, thank you.