Calculator
What a year of teacher absences costs your building
Enter your staff size, absence rate, sub pay, and fill rate to see the annual coverage bill including the days nobody fills.
Free tools
Calculators for absence cost and sub folder payback
Two free tools for teachers and school office staff who have to defend coverage decisions with numbers rather than impressions.
Coverage arguments in schools usually stall at the same place. Everyone agrees absences are expensive and nobody has a figure for the building. The first calculator builds that figure out of the pieces a secretary already knows: staff size, days out per teacher, the daily sub rate, the share of jobs that get filled, and what the building pays out when nobody takes the job.
The second calculator answers the question a skeptical teacher asks in the hallway, which is whether building a reusable folder is worth the hours it costs. Put in your period count and how long a set of plans takes you now, and it shows the payback in absences rather than in vague promises. Both run in the page and nothing is stored.
Calculator
How fast a reusable sub folder pays back the time to build it
Enter your period count and how long plans take you now to see the build cost in hours and the payback in absences.
Working document
The one day substitute handoff template
A fill in template that turns a sick day into a taught day, written so a substitute who has never met your class can run it cold.
Why the coverage math is open to anyone who has to defend it
Right now this arithmetic gets done by hand on the back of an attendance sheet. A secretary multiplies the daily sub rate by the days out, adds a rough guess for payroll, and quietly leaves off the stipends the building paid the week four jobs went unfilled. A teacher runs the other version in her head on a Sunday night, counting five periods times twenty minutes of fresh plans and deciding it is cheaper to drive in with a fever than to write the day from a phone at 5:40 in the morning. Both sums deserve better than a sticky note, so both calculators run in the page with no sign up, no email, and nothing stored.
They are worth using even if you never open ChalkHandoff. The annual coverage figure is the one number a principal or a business office will actually engage with, because it maps to sub pay and coverage stipends the building already spends rather than to money somebody is asking for. The payback figure settles the hallway argument about whether banking three ready to teach days is worth one afternoon in September. Run them, print the result, and take it into the next staffing conversation on your own.
Two numbers, one coverage conversation
Once you have an annual coverage figure and a payback in absences, the question turns into what to change before the next flu week. A walkthrough covers banked sub days, current seating charts, and the pack that reaches whoever gets assigned to the room. Bring the figures you just ran and we will work from those rather than from ours.