Parents and guardians of students at Trillium Lakelands District School Board as well as Near North District School Board are being advised to prepare for online learning and school closures if education workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) go on strike this Monday.
Talks between the Province and CUPE broke down once again. In a statement on Wednesday, CUPE said they were able to reach a middle ground with the Province on wages, “despite that progress, the government refused to invest in the services that students need and parents expect, precipitating this escalation.”
Education Minister Steven Lecce blamed CUPE for adding more to the table.
The Province’s latest offer includes a flat annual increase of 3.59 per cent for all workers, which the union has accepted. Lecce said the agreement would cost $335 million over four years, and the province has not asked for any concessions in return. But CUPE is asking for more money for services.
“If this government was serious about their plan to catch up, they’d listen to the workers who do the most to support learners and they’d put an early childhood educator in every kindergarten class and provide more students with the direct support of an educational assistant,” said Laura Walton, educational assistant and president of CUPE’s Ontario School Boards Council of Unions (OSBCU).
“We’ve heard from parents desperate for these improvements. We felt their support at our protests across the province. And we’re not going to turn our backs on students, parents, and families,” she added.
What education workers want:
- enough educational assistants so all students get the supports they need and so schools could stop sending kids home because there isn’t an EA available;
- an early childhood educator in every kindergarten classroom so every four- and five-year-old would get the play-based learning support that’s especially necessary now after two years of pandemic isolation;
- enough library workers to make sure school libraries are open and reading opportunities are available to kids all the time;
- enough custodians to keep schools clean and enough maintenance workers and tradespeople to begin to tackle the $16 billion repair backlog; and
- adequate staffing of secretaries in school offices and enough lunchroom supervisors to keep students safe.
The School Boards Collective Bargaining Act requires that workers employed by school boards give five days’ notice before beginning a job action, which means a strike is possible starting on Monday, November 21 if the parties are unable to reach a deal.
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Brian Tapley says
Laudable goals for sure.
I’m a bit at sea about some of the claims and the costs are an issue for me.
Granted I do not “work” in a school, but from my visits over the years I have to note that those that I have been in seem to be well maintained compared to a lot of private industrial work sites.
They look pretty clean, the lights and heat work.Things can always be better but I find it hard to believe these buildings are on the verge of collapse due to lack of maintenance.
Things like libraries and gymnasiums did not exist in our public school in the 60’s when I passed through them. The first library I encountered in school was one room dedicated as a library in grade 9. Other than that it was a trip to the town library, which was much smaller than it is now. Small municipalities simply did not have libraries at all.
We did not have kindergarten either, at all. We simply started with grade 1.
Now I’m not saying this was good and yes, some students fell behind but somehow the teachers we had back then managed to get some of the more senior students to help with their younger ones. This was I suppose the equivalent of a teaching assistant, it was free and it was a big reinforcement of what the senior student had recently learned . It helped to build inter grade friendships that lasted a lifetime.
Again, I’m not saying this is “ideal” and I must defer to more learned professionals in the educational field on what is best today.
I merely point this out because somehow, with all these things lacking we all managed to survive and many businesses were started and still exist, run by these former students.
The problem I have today is simply the cost. How is all this to be funded?
My municipal property tax takes about 50% for education, this despite the fact that I have no direct offspring using any public school system at all now, and haven’t for a while.
Some folks take the position that those using the educational system should be paying more of the costs of it. (User pay fees like many municipal services these days) While I don’t subscribe to this viewpoint it is out there.
What I can say is that municipal taxes are my single biggest cost of operation of my business today. Granted we get somewhat better service for things like roads. Much better for fire protection, and environmental things like waste services and planning and I think we all have to admit that schools today are much better than they were in the past.
The simple point I would make is that the current cost of municipal taxation is, as I say, my single biggest cost, fast being approached by the cost of energy and electronic communication. All seem destined only to increase.
I don’t think the current funding model for education is adequate or fair for the costs now being incurred and those that we wish to add. Like everybody who looks at a wish list, all the things we want to add sound great. I like them. They will help students and ultimately society and thus I’m supportive but our government has to remember there is only so much tax business can pay, especially at the municipal level.
If you want small business to continue to exist there needs to be enough income to keep modernizing the product and enough left over after our tax obligations and direct costs such as labor to make it worthwhile to the owners. I think we need a better system of funding if we want to support the current teachers requests. I don’t know what it should be exactly as I neither have access to all the numbers nor the time and facilities to properly analyze them but I do know it is an issue for a lot of business and home owners now so I’m looking to see someone working in this area to be putting forward some suggestions to make things work better.
So far, with both education and health care, the government has worked at a sort of cost containment or service restriction level. This is one approach but I fear it is not the best. We need more funds and there must be a better way found to get them and I’m watching to see what is proposed.
Privatization of some of these services has been proposed many times but I remain unconvinced that this is the best way. A look to the south in the USA will show you what privatization can do. For the very rich it is fantastic, for the rest not so good and for the poor it is a disaster. If nothing else I think Canada is better than the USA in many ways and I would hate to lose this feature of our society in a headlong rush to save a few dollars (maybe) with privatization. Some services are best done by our government.
We all should be looking at these issues and doing some creative thinking. Our leaders should be talking about things like this as we are going to be faced with costs to try to mitigate climate change very shortly that will make any squabble over educational or health care funding look tiny.