K-12 Education Staffing

What the roles in a K-12 building actually cover

Walk a school building and the org chart gets concrete fast. Teachers carry the instruction — general education by grade or subject, special education organized around IEP caseloads in self-contained rooms, resource rooms, and co-taught classrooms. Paraprofessionals make the ratios work: 1:1 assignments written into IEPs, classroom support, personal-care duties, and the cafeteria, recess, and dismissal coverage that keeps the building safe. Substitutes split into day-to-day coverage, where the job is executing another teacher's plans for a room of strangers, and long-term assignments, where the sub effectively becomes the teacher of record for weeks.

Around the classrooms sit the licensed specialists — SLPs, OTs, PTs, school psychologists, behavioral staff — carrying evaluation and therapy caseloads across buildings, plus the operational roles no one budgets enough attention for: front office, food service, custodial, bus drivers. A single mid-size school runs on a dozen distinct job descriptions, and a vacancy in any one of them lands on the same principal's desk.

What separates a strong hire from a body in a seat differs by role — data fidelity for a para, classroom management under ambiguity for a sub, caseload discipline for a clinician — but the common thread is reliability. In a school, the person who shows up every day and does the job as designed is worth two who interview brilliantly.

What we screen for, role by role

We do not run one generic interview across thirteen role types. Substitutes are screened for classroom management under ambiguity — walking into an unfamiliar room at 7:40 with someone else's plans — and for morning-of reliability, verified with prior schools. Paras are screened for de-escalation experience, comfort with personal-care duties, and IEP data collection. Teachers are probed on planning, IEP writing where relevant, and how they run a room in February, not just September. Licensed clinicians get licensure verification plus caseload-management questions.

The role-matched approach comes from our founder, Robert Flom, a former K-12 teacher who knows firsthand that a great para and a great sub are great at different things.

One vendor for thirteen kinds of vacancy

A K-12 building does not break down neatly into a teacher agency's catalog. The same week a principal loses a fourth-grade teacher, they lose a bus driver and a 1:1 aide. At Odyssey Public Charter School in Wilmington, Delaware, we have staffed 13+ distinct role types and filled 120+ roles — teachers, paraprofessionals, substitutes, support staff, and yes, bus drivers. Day-to-day sub coverage there runs at a 95% fill rate, 40% better than the previous provider. The case study is at /case-studies.

That breadth is deliberate. When one vendor holds the whole building, nothing falls between two contracts, and the school has one phone number instead of five. Districts we work with include Christina School District, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Chambersburg Area SD, Leadership Public Schools, Carmen Schools of Science & Tech, and TRECA.

Built by a teacher, twelve years in

FSG's founder, Robert Flom, taught in K-12 classrooms before starting the firm 12 years ago. That background is not a bio line; it is the vetting standard. Candidates are interviewed by people who know the difference between someone who can talk about classroom management and someone who has done it in February with a full room.

We are headquartered in Wayne, Pennsylvania and staff schools across PA, DE, NJ, and MD, plus districts nationally. Every candidate clears a background check, the state-required clearances, certification verification where the role demands it, a TB test, references, and a skills screen before you meet them.

The model: exclusive pipeline, no conversion fee, half the wait

Three mechanics separate our engagements from a standard staffing contract. First, one client per region: if you sign with us for your area, we will not supply a competing school, so the pipeline we recruit is exclusively yours. Second, temp-to-perm at no cost — evaluate any placement in your building and hire them permanently with no conversion fee. Third, automated credentialing that tracks every clearance and certification, flags expirations, and cuts typical time-to-hire roughly in half.

Those mechanics produce the outcomes on this page: certified special education teachers placed within two weeks in past engagements, and engagements where 100% of open roles were filled with 100% candidate retention. We also run school-supply and backpack donation drives for partner schools each year.