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One employee works as cook, tutor and driver as staff shortages strain Colorado schools
Crystal Quintana, who works in a tiny rural district in the San Luis Valley, makes sure students have food, academic support and a ride home.
coloradosun.com
SAN LUIS — By 6 a.m. most weekdays, Crystal Quintana is walking through the kitchen doors of Centennial School District R-1 to tackle the first tasks of the morning, which sometimes means molding homemade dough into cinnamon rolls or wrestling that same dough into slabs for square pizzas. Other times, dozens of chicken patties wait to be laid across sheet pans while 7-pound cans of baked beans sit ready to be opened and emptied.
Twelve or 13 hours later, she’ll head home to tend to her family’s pigs, cows and horses.
The minutes in between hurl Quintana in a blur of different directions: As the food service director for the rural district, she feeds about 160 students with as many meals made from scratch as her team can manage. She also oversees an after-school tutoring program for kids falling behind in at least one class and runs a Friday learning program for students who are trying to make up credits. And Quintana, who lives about 8 miles away in San Acacio, usually then shuttles several kids home, driving into remote stretches of the southern Colorado district to drop them off one by one.
And that’s all if the day goes as planned.
“I just help wherever they need me,” said Quintana, who also takes over bus routes when no one else can.
Stretching across multiple jobs has become a kind of chaotic norm for her and many other educators and school employees in Colorado, where chronic staff shortages have spread more work across fewer people. While Colorado continues to face teacher shortages, many schools also desperately need more school bus drivers, food service workers, counselors and paraprofessionals.
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