Increasing pay and earlier recruitment has helped Arlington Public Schools improve its substitute teacher hiring efforts, school system leaders said at a board meeting last week.

The school system ended the first week of school with an 89% substitute fill rate, chief academic officer Gerald Mann said. In previous years, around the same time, the fill rate has ranged from 60% to 80%.

“We’re looking pretty good right now,” Mann told school board members.

Arlington changed its approach to recruiting substitutes by increasing pay so that it’s more competitive with other school systems, Superintendent Francisco Duran said. It also altered how long-term substitutes are paid. Instead of having to wait until the 11th work day to get extra pay, long-term substitutes will receive the long-term substitute rate on the first day.

“This year, we did start a lot earlier with reaching out to substitutes for those vacant positions that we had available,” Mann said. “I believe on day one we had 38 vacancies, and 37 positions were filled with substitutes at that particular time.”

The county has about 1,000 active substitutes, Mann said, and has rebuilt its pool of potential substitutes, scrubbing candidates who “are no longer coming in for jobs.”

Nearby Fairfax County Public Schools, the state’s largest school district, has similarly offered bonuses and other incentives as part of a plan to improve its substitute teacher recruiting efforts.

Last fall, Joanne Jackson, project administrator in Fairfax County’s Office of Substitute Employment, said principals called the incentive program a “game changer.”