Bethany Bump reports in The Albany Times-Union that the state Board of Regents July 11 allowed school districts to employ a substitute without a teaching certificate for up to 90 days. The current limit is 40-days, but administrators have a teacher shortage. But not all regents favored the change. "The places and the school districts that have the most difficulty finding teachers are the districts that have large numbers of high-poverty students — the very population that we want to improve in terms of academic performance," said Regent Judith Johnson. "And we want to put into their classroom teachers who are not qualified and not certified to teach kids who desperately need rigorous opportunities to learn? This is unconscionable." Most board members who supported the change, the story says, "said they did so, not because it was an ideal fix, but because if they didn't do anything districts would be forced to yank acceptable substitutes from classrooms after the current 40-day limit without having anyone lined up to replace them." Read the full story in The Albany Times-Union.