BC

Re-assigning specialist teachers causing stress, may lead to violence in classrooms: union

Susan Lazaruk - Yesterday - Vancouver Sun

A provincewide teacher shortage may be putting B.C.’s most vulnerable students at risk as specialist teachers are often being reassigned to fill in for absent teachers, says a union for one of B.C.’s largest school districts.

Lizanne Foster, president of the Surrey Teachers Association.

The Surrey Teachers Association says specialist teachers, including those who provide extra teaching help for children with learning or physical disabilities, behavioural problems, autism or dyslexia, are regularly asked to fill in when a substitute teacher isn’t available.

That leaves the students who rely on the specialist teachers without their usual help, said the association’s vice-president, Lizanne Foster.

“It’s quite cruel in one sense, what’s happening in our classrooms,” she said. “When the kids have big emotions,” they need the specialist teacher they are familiar with and who know how to calm them down.

Without that support, “that’s when you have students throwing things and flipping things and biting,” incidents that sometimes require a “room clear,” she said.

Re-assigning specialist teachers to fill in for absent teachers is “absolutely happening elsewhere” and has for years, said Clint Johnston, president of the B.C. Teachers Federation.

“It affects lots of students and lots of teachers,” he said. But, “I would be very cautious about drawing any direct link” between violence in the classrooms and the teacher shortage.

Teachers and the Education Ministry agree that the solution is more teachers.

“We know some long-standing hiring pressures remain in areas, including for specialist positions,” B.C.’s education minister, Jennifer Whiteside, said in an emailed statement.

She also said the province has acted on “all the recommendations” from a 2017 report from a task force on recruitment and retention of teachers after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of the BCTF in a court battle over class size and composition.

“For example, our government invested $3.5 million in 2018-19 to create new seats in teacher education programs, adding close to 250 new spaces to bring in more teachers in high demand positions and we’ll continue to invest” in education, she said.

The ministry also said it created an education program that mixes online and in-person learning for students who may not live near universities, changed certification standards to allow internationally trained teachers to work while training and reduced processing times for certification.

In Prince George, “We have had a shortage for about six years and every year it gets worse,” said Daryl Beauregard, president of the Prince George District Teachers Association.

He said there has been a “significant increase in violence especially over the last year and there are a lot of things going on in society and that comes in to schools. But it’s hard to conclude a cause and effect” to a teacher shortage.

He said it is clear students aren’t getting the support they need when a specialist teacher is reassigned.

In Surrey, “We are getting calls to our office from teachers in utter and complete distress,” said Foster. The calls have been coming from new teachers and veterans. “They’re saying, ‘I cannot cope.’ What shocked us was it was happening at the beginning of the (school) year. That usually happens in May or June.”

According to one of those specialist teachers who works in Surrey, student “behaviour can sometimes be violent because these students don’t have a lot of words to express their wants and needs and they can get quite physical to express their upset.”

The teacher requested anonymity because she wasn’t sure how employer would react to her speaking publicly and she didn’t want to risk identifying individual students with her comments.

She and Foster also said the district has a policy of not replacing the specialist teachers unless they are absent for more than three days, which they said further imperils the students that depend on them.

Surrey school district depends upon 1,500 names in the teachers on-call list and when none are available, teachers or sometimes principals are asked to fill in because continuity of care for students is paramount, spokeswoman Ritinder Matthew said in an email.

The district intends to increase the number of on-call teachers and has created 40 new specialty teacher positions to add to the 1,650 on staff, a difficult task because of the lack of qualified candidates.

Foster said in Surrey there have been 58 violence on the job claims filed with WorkSafeBC since the beginning of this school year, twice the average.

But the district said there has been seven such claims this school year, which are “time lost and/or health care claims,” and said it is only slightly higher than previous years. Matthew said the higher number refers to incidents reported to the district, which could include witnessing two students fighting.

Beauregard said the Education Ministry needs a provincewide strategy to tackle the shortage because B.C. teachers are being lost to Alberta. He said he knows of one B.C. teacher got a raise of $17,000 a year by moving to Medicine Hat.

Johnston said the recently negotiated settlement members will be asked to ratify this month is part of the solution to attract and keep teachers in B.C. The terms haven’t been disclosed but he said the wage increase is a “decent start. It certainly helps, it closes a large chasm” in pay compared to other provinces.

He said the province has to come up with other creative solutions to attract and keep teachers because the 250 extra positions for teacher training it created years about five years ago aren’t being filled anymore.

He said there has to be improvements to help for teachers living in B.C., an expensive province, and reduce “untenable” workloads. The province should consider loan forgiveness and housing subsidies for teachers, he said.

slazaruk@postmedia.com