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For other articles and a chance to comment go to www.cbc.ca A Grade 6 teacher on Vancouver Island says the students in her class can’t learn because they don’t get enough help.

“I have very emotionally damaged children in my class … and I can’t spread myself thin enough,” said Naomi Nilsson, who has been teaching since 2006.

Nilsson has 27 students in her class at Khowhemun Elementary in Duncan, B.C. Eight of them are designated as having special needs.

“I know that they are not going to get the education that they deserve — and I know that society is going to be damaged because of that.”

The Cowichan Valley School District confirmed two of Nilsson’s students have severe behaviour problems, and six others have learning disabilities. She said several more need extra help but have not been formally assessed, so they haven’t been designated for assistance.

“I would love it if I could split myself up into 27 little pieces and sit next to each one of them and help them do their math,” Nilsson said.

_Teacher Naomi Nilsson tells reporter Kathy Tomlinson her Grade 6 students are not learning because they don’t get enough help. CBC Her class has one part-time teacher’s aide, who is in the classroom one morning and one afternoon per week.

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“It’s infuriating, because there just isn’t enough money to give these kids enough support,” she said.

Nilsson said many of her students come from stressed families, where both parents work several low-paying jobs and are often away from home.

Children hungry, tired “My students come to school hungry … without lunches and without snacks. Some of them don’t have winter coats,” Nilsson said while holding back tears.

“They can’t just sit. Some of them it’s almost like they have little electrodes attached to their bodies and they wiggle and they vibrate.”

Nilsson described one heartbreaking situation when one of her students came to school distraught, because his mother tried to commit suicide the night before.

“[Another] student comes to school just to sleep, because his home is not safe for him to sleep in,” she said.

B.C. teachers have filed 17,600 grievances in the last five years, to protest the number of students in their classes, along with the number who have special needs. According to the B.C. Teachers’ Federation (BCTF), there are 12,240 classes in B.C. that have three or more students designated with special needs.

_CBCGovernment figures show, on average, about 10 per cent of all students are in that category — reaching a high of 19 per cent in one district. The union said several more students are on waiting lists to be assessed. Education Minister George Abbott acknowledged there is a problem.

“Certainly this is one of the challenges that the school system tries to deal with,” said Abbott, who recently promised an additional $165 million over three years to provide assistance for special needs students.

Minister suggests improvements “We want to sit down with the teachers’ federation and work through what I hope would be an improved model in respect of the funding for special needs.”

B.C. teachers and the government are at an impasse in contract negotiations, mostly due to class composition.

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Although she is a member of the teachers’ federation, Nilsson said she does not work for the provincial union, but is speaking out after encouragement from other teachers.

“I need to speak out because enough is enough,” said Nilsson. “I am stretched thin. My school is stretched thin. The B.C. education system is stretched thin. Somebody needs to do something. There needs to be a change made for the kids.

“Someone’s got to speak up for them,” she said, through tears. “Because they can’t themselves.”

The district superintendent for the Cowichan Valley School District, which oversees Nilsson’s school, said there are several programs and people dedicated to helping special needs children. Joe Rhodes said 300 special needs children get public money for assistance, while another 455 who also need extra help get no extra money.

_Nilsson says many of her students come to school hungry, tired and too stressed to learn. CBC“As a district, we have to take from core money to supplement special needs kids,” said Rhodes, adding the district gets $5 million per year from the province for special programs, but spends $9 million.

_Kathy Tomlinson www.cbc.ca

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Education Funding Brief 2011 BC Teachers’ Federation

bctf.ca/BriefsAndPositionPapers.aspx

Public Schools: The future is in our hands 1. Introduction

We appreciate the opportunity to present our views on the provincial government’s budget to the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. It is a crucial time for public education in British Columbia and we take very seriously the chance to provide information and our perspective on the relationship between the budget and the needs of students and teachers.

Our brief presents evidence of the challenge that faces us all and we hope you will examine the details in the statistics and charts in the second section of this brief.

As we are sure you know, we believe that public education is underfunded in BC. We have heard many times that the schools have the highest funding ever. While that may be true in actual dollars, it is not true of the levels of service that those dollars will purchase. The costs of running schools have gone up more than the funding provided. Some of that is because of inflationary factors, but, also, a significant amount is a result of costs that have been downloaded onto school districts.

The proof of this is in the statistics about the staffing of the schools and the conditions in classrooms. In the last school year (2010–11), we had 3,627 classes with over 30 students, that is, over the maximum class size as set out in the School Act. Even more disturbing, we had over 12,000 classes with four or more students with special needs, again over the maximum (of three) specified in the School Act.

Any improvements that have been made in class size in the primary grades have come at an incredible cost to students with the most needs. The result is that we have lost the learning specialist positions that played a key role in building a school system ranked among the best in the world, according to the OECD PISA results.

These cuts have caused a high degree of professional anxiety in teachers as we can no longer meet the needs of the students in our care. Class size, class composition, and the provision of learning specialist services to students have long been high priorities for teachers. For many years, teachers sacrificed wage and benefit improvements in order to improve our working conditions and our students’ learning conditions. For example, in 1998 the majority of teachers voted to approve a collective agreement with a zero salary increase in two years while many other public sector employees were getting wage increases. Teachers agreed to those two years of “zero” in return for gains of better staffing for learning specialist teachers (special education, ESL, counsellors, teacher-librarians) through staffing formulas built into the collective agreement, as well as guarantees of class size and class composition standards.Those two years of “zero,” and another of one percent, are part of why the salary of teachers in BC has fallen so far behind the salaries of teachers in all the other provinces in Western Canada and Ontario. When you divert funds from the base salary, you fall further and further behind— even if you get the same percentage increases as others in future years. It also means that a future “zero” has a further negative effect, comparative to other public sector workers who did not agree to “zero” in those years.

Having accepted “zero” in 1998 for two years to gain improvements in services to students, teachers then faced legislation which Madame Justice Griffin described as a perceived insult to teachers in her BC Supreme Court ruling on Bills 27 and 28. She wrote,

The legislation undoubtedly was seen by teachers as evidence that the government did not respect them or consider them to be valued contributors to the education system, having excluded them from any freedom to associate to influence their working conditions.1

Bills 27 and 28 in 2002 stripped the teacher collective agreements of the staffing gains that were paid for by the sacrifices teachers had made in bargaining.

Three results flow from this situation (which are documented later in this brief):

1. The staffing to provide educational services to our students has declined substantially since 2002. British Columbia is unique; we have worsening staffing conditions, while other provinces improved staffing to support students. Like BC, most provinces in Canada experienced declining enrolment over the last decade. Unlike BC, most provinces chose to improve learning conditions for students, during this period, by hiring more educators. In fact, the change in employment of educators decreased by about the same percentage in BC as it increased in Canada as a whole.

2. Teacher salaries have fallen further and further behind those of teachers in other provinces.

3. The BC Supreme Court has said that the actions taken by the province in Bills 27 and 28 were not legal; they were a violation of teachers’ fundamental constitutional rights. Justice Griffin provided one year for the province to remedy the situation.

The BC government has cut taxes substantially over the past decade. In particular, it reduced taxation on corporations and for those with the highest incomes. These tax cuts shrank government revenue, resulting in cuts to public services including education.

However, the people of BC rely on government services and expect them to be of high quality. When they see that the services they need are being funded by an increase in taxes, and those taxes are greatest for those who can best afford them, the public readily supports such a tax regime.

Having a good public education system is not optional. It is essential for the health of our society and our economy, as well as for the development of the potential of every child. That is why the funding must be there to restore strength, resilience, and quality to the system.

_Sept 7. 2011
BC teacher salaries are well behind other provinces Teachers in BC have fallen behind teacher colleagues in other provinces.

A chart published in the Globe and Mail shows Calgary teacher salaries $20,000 higher than those in Vancouver. Toronto secondary teachers make $15,000 more than Victoria teachers. These gaps exist despite Metro Vancouver, with half the province’s teachers, having the highest cost of living in Canada.

Here are the comparisons in the chart:

Salary Comparison: Canadian teacher salary rankings as of 2011 
Maximum for Category 5 teachers, which is the ranking for most BC teachers.

Northwest Territories Teachers’ Association $111,929 Yellowknife Catholic $106,800 Yellowknife School District No. 1 $103,365 Nunavut $101,334 Edmonton School District 7 $95,354 Yukon $95,153 Calgary School District 19 $95,073 Toronto Secondary $89,614 Eastern Unit of the Ontario English Catholic TA     $88,933 Ottawa-Carleton Secondary $88,816 Elementary Teachers of Toronto $87,882 Ottawa-Carleton Elementary $86,717 Brandon $78,341 Saskatchewan (2010) $76,593 Winnipeg (2010) $76,424 New Brunswick $75,241 Prince George (at June 30, 2011) $74,353 Vancouver (at June 30, 2011) $74,353 Victoria (at June 30, 2011) $74,353 Quebec $71,946 PEI $68,117 Nova Scotia (2010) $67,186 Newfoundland and Labrador $67,001 You can read the Globe’s story on the BC teachers’ labour dispute here.

For further information, see the BCTF report Canadian Teacher Salary Rankings: Provinces and Territories here.

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The provincial government has given direction to its agents to refuse to offer any increases to teachers in the current round of bargaining. They are calling this “net zero.”

What they seem to mean is that any improvement has to be gained by giving up existing conditions in some other area of the collective agreement.

For teachers, this is an impossible situation.

The government in legislation in 2002 stripped from the collective agreement many of the working conditions provisions that would presumably have been on the table to trade under the “net zero” directive.

Many of these “tradable” provisions were achieved as a trade off in collective agreements in the 1990s for lower class sizes, limits on class composition and staffing formulas for learning specialists like librarians and special education teachers. This put teachers further behind in salaries and with no contractual provisions that could be traded.

Even if teachers still had these provisions to trade off for salaries, that would not have been a good idea. Satisfaction in teaching comes from a combination of good conditions for the work and fair and reasonable salaries. Unfortunately, BC teachers now have neither of those, thanks to government policies.

A zero increase would widen the already huge gap between the salaries of teachers in the rest of the Western provinces as well as Ontario. An Alberta teacher, for example, already makes about $20,000 a year more than a teacher with equivalent training and experience in B.C.—and has a lower cost of living.

Accepting a zero salary increase would only make the situation worse. And it would further entrench what Justice Griffin said in a court decision was a feeling by teachers “that the government did not respect them or consider them to be valued contributors to the education system.”

The refusal of government to change its “net zero” direction to the BC Public Employers’ Association is further evidence of that lack of valuing of teachers.

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New! Phase 1 of job action agreement from Labour Relations Board ! Check out the bargaining page.
New Releases from BCPSEA
BCPSEA E__Professional growth and engagement
BCPSEA E29 Posting and filling employee assignment and transfer

June 20, 2011

Government Releases their agenda in power point form. Have a look at the annotated version explaining what it all means.
Annotated Bargaining Presentation

June 10, 2011

So far, government refuses to restore funding for September

On May 20 and June 3, 2011, BCTF and government representatives met to discuss how the government intends to address the repercussions of the BC Supreme Court decision on the unconstitutionality of Bill 28. The BCTF made its position clear:

· Teacher collective agreement language regarding class size, class composition, non-enrolling caseloads and ratios, and all related language is restored, and forms the baseline for collective agreement negotiations.

· Government must repeal the unconstitutional legislation and return prelegislation learning conditions for students and working conditions for teachers by September 2011.

· Government and BCTF must address the issue of compensation owing to the public education system as a consequence of the ruling.

Government, however, is refusing to admit that the legislation was unconstitutional. It insists that the only flaw in the government’s actions was that it did not consult with the BCTF prior to passing the legislation in 2002. As a result, government is now insisting on this process:

· Government meets with BCTF to outline its policy objectives of “flexibility and choice.”

· Government outlines the collective agreement impediments to achieving its objectives.

· Government consults and negotiates with the BCTF to determine how to “align” the collective agreement with government policy objectives.

· Government introduces “corrective legislation” to strip the collective agreement and thus implement its policy objectives.

In a letter to BCTF President Susan Lambert dated June 9, government representative Paul Straszak reiterated government’s position and proposed a process of “negotiation” with the BCTF in advance of introducing “corrective legislation.”

Liberal education bills violate charter right to freedom of association The teachers of BC won a tremendous victory in the BC Supreme Court today, in a landmark decision that will have significant implications for classroom conditions across the province and for the current round of collective bargaining for 41,000 BC public school teachers.

Madame Justice Susan Griffin has ruled that Bills 27 and 28 are unconstitutional because they violate teachers’ rights to freedom of association under Section 2 (d) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The bills stripped teachers’ collective agreements of class size limits and guarantees of support for students with special needs, with disastrous consequences for teaching and learning conditions in classrooms across the province.

BCTF President Susan Lambert said the significance of the win cannot be overstated. “Teachers once again have full and free collective bargaining rights and our collective agreements must be honoured,” she said. “Over the past decade, we have put tremendous effort and determination into the struggle to reassert our rights and regain the kind of teaching and learning conditions in our classrooms that we know students need and deserve, and today all those efforts are vindicated.”

Lambert said because of the offending legislation the government was able to underfund education and limit teachers’ ability to insist upon adequate resources. “Children who were in Kindergarten when these bills were imposed are now in Grade 10. Almost their entire school careers have been in a time when their teachers had to fight for the classroom conditions and learning resources to meet their needs,” Lambert said.

Bills 27 and 28 were rushed through the BC legislature over a weekend, sparking outraged teachers to walk off the job in a day of protest.

“I’ll never forget that weekend,” said Lambert. “It is vivid in my memory. The passage of these bills was devastating. They constituted a theft of 20 years of work and sacrifice of teachers to ensure adequate funding, smaller classes, and attention for kids with special needs. It was stolen by a government that violated our rights with impunity.”

Lambert noted that teachers used every tool possible to resist the legislation: political advocacy, costly and lengthy court proceedings, and even an appeal to the United Nations.

“The International Labour Organization found the government in violation of international law, but then-premier Campbell just shrugged off any obligation to bring BC back into compliance with international conventions we had signed,” Lambert recalled. “What does this tell you about our democracy under the BC Liberals?”

Lambert said the BCTF expects government to act promptly to rectify the situation.

_Feb 24, 2010

School closures map

  RadioLabour Daily