ESS is an Education Staffing Solutions service company that partners with schools all across the nation to help provide substitute and other permanent staffing solutions for various school positions, and they have now opened up business in Cibola County. Before ESS came to Cibola County, CCSD schools were staffing internally, but starting back in July, they were able to receive assistance from ESS for their staffing needs. “Now with ESS, it’s all based on online scheduling. Substitutes work for ESS and are assigned electronically. It’ll work really well when we have students back on campuses,” said GHS Principal Lane Widner of the new service.
ESS has been established within New Mexico for three years and is currently working with four different New Mexico school districts: Gallup-McKinley County Schools, Grants/Cibola County Schools, Central Consolidated Schools, and Carlsbad Municipal Schools. Nationwide, ESS currently has 75,000 substitutes and permanent staff working for them and being placed. Meanwhile, locally, ESS already has 67 substitutes working for them and being placed around the district. According to local Applicant Specialist Marisa Corley, that number is growing weekly.
Anyone who is interested in working for ESS can apply online. They must have a minimum of a high school diploma and go through a process of backgrounds checks. According to Area Man ager Monica Murillo, located in Gallup, ESS walks each applicant through the necessary steps, from application, to training if needed, to receiving substitute licenses, to being hired and given an assignment. The ESS-created software, created and used within the last year, makes the process of assigning subs much easier because a teacher is able to electronically indicate the days they might be gone, and then ESS is easily able to fill that position for that time through assigning the subs.
Substitute teachers are not the only positions that ESS works with – they also work with placing classroom assistants, special education aides, school aides, clerical personnel, food service staff, administrators, coaches, nurses, counselors, and clinicians. According to ESS Vice President of Operations Joseph Fitzgerald, located in Utah, working for ESS comes with a plethora of employee benefits, including weekly pay, healthcare, insurance, recognitions through raffles and awards, and referral programs. Applicant Specialist Corley also added that ESS is a great “stepping stone” for those that want to get involved with the district.
Aside from being involved in education, ESS also maintains a good amount of community involvement through working with charities and different things going on in the communities it is established in. As for Cibola County, due to the COVID-19 pandemic growing worse right around the time ESS joined the community, ESS’s community involvement has been limited but Corley says that she looks forward to participating in and administering things like school supply drives, food drives, and teacher appreciation days for the community in the future. Essentially, ESS’s central way of helping communities is by providing quality employees for the schools and creating more jobs for the communities.
According to Corley, Murillo, and Fitzgerald, ESS’s hopes for the future are that it continues to make an impact on children and their educations. They want to make sure that classrooms are always filled through providing quality employees so that students can always have quality education. “That’s what we strive to do at ESS. We strive to hire individuals that are passionate about education,” said the VP of Operations.