Emergency sub plans

Emergency sub plans are written by the wrong person, at the wrong time.

Emergency sub plans get written at 5am by someone with a fever — or in August, by someone guessing, and are out of date by February. The fix is to write them once, on a healthy day, from your real class: your schedule, seating, dismissal and banked lessons, stored. On the sick morning there is nothing to write. One tap builds the packet and sends it to your office.

Why emergency plans fail

Teachers say it plainly: taking a day off creates more work than showing up sick, so they show up sick. The plan gets drafted half-asleep, the roster is last semester's, the seating chart is three reshuffles old, and dismissal — the page that matters most — lives in a different document entirely. The sub walks in at 7am to a packet that was never true on any single day. None of that is a effort problem; it's a timing problem. The information exists. It's just never assembled at a moment when assembling is possible.

What a real emergency plan contains

The same nine things as any good sub packet: the day at a glance, a current seating chart, dismissal per student, people notes (helpers, who can't sit together, pull-outs), where things are, tech logins and the paper fallback, your duties, work that runs itself with an early-finisher supply, the "what to do if…" basics, and a report-back page for the sub. The full checklist is in our sub packet guide. An emergency plan differs from a planned-absence plan in one way: the work. Nobody teaches the real lesson from a packet assembled in an emergency — the work has to be banked in advance, self-contained, and familiar.

Store once, on a healthy day

SubPacket's setup is built for the way this information actually exists: scattered. Paste last year's sub binder, your schedule, an old plan, a syllabus — Patty pulls out the facts, shows you what she found, and saves only what you confirm. Your classes are stored with their bells, rosters and seating; your dismissal, duties and where-things-are are stored once; you bank emergency lessons for your classes, and a built-in activity bank can round out a day matched to your grade, subject and current unit, with answer keys. Setup and your first packet are free.

Keeping it from going stale

The August problem is real: seating changes every few weeks and rosters turn over at term breaks, so a stored packet needs a freshness habit, not just a good first save. Once a month SubPacket emails you a two-minute check-in — one tap says "still right," or you tell Patty the one thing that changed ("Period 3 moved to the library") and it files it under the right class. Start-of-term reminders wear a reset framing, because that's when the big changes land. Any edit you make counts as confirming, so the reminder only ever asks when it's genuinely been a while.

Planned absence? Different button.

When you know a week ahead — a conference, a procedure, a personal day — you usually want the real lesson taught, not banked work. Planned mode lets you swap in today's actual lesson per class while everything else in the packet (seating, dismissal, duties, the what-if strip) stays exactly as stored. Emergency and planned absences share one packet; only the work changes.

Quick questions