What to Put in an Emergency Sub Folder (Free Checklist)

An emergency sub folder exists for exactly one kind of day: the one you didn't see coming. Sick, a family emergency, jury duty — whatever it is, the whole point of the folder is that you build it once, when you're calm and have time to think, so that on the actual morning you're not trying to reconstruct your classroom's entire operating system from memory while also feeling terrible.

Here's everything that folder should have, organized into the categories that actually matter on the day.

1Contacts & Logistics

A substitute walking into your room for the first time doesn't know who to call if something goes sideways — and "something" doesn't have to be dramatic. A jammed printer, a student who needs the nurse, a question about dismissal — all of it goes faster with a name and extension already written down.

• Front office phone extension
• Nurse or health office extension
• A specific teacher next door or on your team who's agreed to help
• Tech support contact (extension or email)
• Your own emergency contact, if the school needs to reach you directly

2Daily Schedule

Even a sub covering just your class needs the shape of the day — when it starts, when it ends, and everything that interrupts the middle of it.

• Bell times for every period the sub will cover
• Lunch and recess times, and where the class goes for each
• Any specials, electives, or pull-out schedules (music, PE, resource room)
• Duty assignments, if you have any that day (hallway, cafeteria, bus line)

3Classroom Procedures

This is the section that prevents a genuinely fine lesson plan from turning into classroom chaos. A sub who doesn't know your bathroom pass system, your attendance routine, or how dismissal works is guessing — and a room full of students who know the sub is guessing behaves accordingly.

• Bathroom pass procedure
• How attendance is taken and where the roster is
• Seating chart, or a note on where to find it
• Dismissal routine — bus lines, pickup, walkers
• Cell phone, computer, or flexible seating rules
• Your classroom management system, briefly explained (points, warnings, whatever you use)

4Student-Specific Info

General behavior notes and a couple of names the sub can lean on make an enormous difference in how smoothly the day runs.

• Two or three reliable student helpers who know your routines and can answer questions
• Any student accommodations the sub needs to be aware of, kept general and appropriate to share
• Health notes relevant to a substitute (e.g., an epipen location) — coordinate with your school on what's appropriate to include here versus what stays with the office
• Class roster, ideally with how students prefer to be addressed

5No-Prep Content to Keep on Hand

Even with advance notice, plans sometimes don't get finished, or a sub finishes what you left faster than expected. A small stash of generic, no-grading-required activities fills the gap without anyone scrambling.

• A picture book or short story appropriate for a read-aloud (self-contained, not part of an ongoing unit)
• Writing prompts with lined paper
• A content-area research activity that works with any topic (e.g., "research and present on any US state" or "any animal")
• Task cards or worksheets reviewing a skill your class has already mastered, so no new teaching is required
• A graphic organizer that works with any book or topic

6Emergency Procedures

This is the section a sub hopes never to need — but the one time they do, having it written down instead of guessed matters enormously.

• Fire drill route and where the class lines up outside
• Lockdown location and procedure
• Nearest exit if the primary route is blocked
• Nurse's office location and how to send a student there

7Build It Once, Use It Whenever

The reason sub folders fail isn't usually that teachers don't know what to include — it's that building one takes real time, and real time is exactly what's missing on the morning it's needed. The fix is building a general-purpose version when you're not in a rush: contacts, schedule, procedures, and emergency info that stay accurate all year, plus a folder of no-prep activities you refresh once a semester.

When advance notice is possible (a planned absence, PD day, jury duty), swap in the day's specific lesson content — that's a five-minute update to a folder that already exists, instead of building the whole thing from scratch under pressure.