Saskatchewan teachers strike for a second day
By Ryan Kiedrowski, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The World-Spectator
Teachers across the province once again took up their signs last week as a second one-day strike left classrooms empty last Monday.
The action came after another five-day countdown for the provincial government and the Saskatchewan Teacher’s Federation to meet at the negotiation table.
PHOTOS BY CORY GETZ WITH EMERALD ATELIER, click for larger images
“We gave them another five-day grace period to try to get it together and make the phone call and give the government trustee bargaining committee a mandate to go back to actually negotiate,” said STF Executive member Peggy Welter.
“But instead, what we heard from the minister’s (Jeremy Cockrill, Minister of Education) mouth himself was that he wasn’t having it; that he has drawn his line in the sand and will not cross it. He has decided that he is not willing to budge, and I think we can see by the number of teachers who are out here on this still a fairly chilly day, we’re not moving either.”
According to Welter, the communication lines are open, but calls remain figuratively and literally unanswered.
“We’re more than willing to discuss if they would come back to the table with a mandate to actually negotiate. We will be there,” she said. “He’s got our president’s number, he can call her at any point. But without a mandate, it’s a waste of everybody’s time and money to sit at that table and for us to hear no, no, no, over and over.”
She said the STF has been trying to negotiate with the province for months, but the province says that the provincial bargaining table is strictly to discuss wages, and issues of classroom complexity cannot be dealt with there, but at the division level.
“We’ve been at it since May, and we’ve been hearing ‘no, no, no’ since May, and them being unwilling—or in the case of the committee—unable because it didn’t have the mandate to actually bargain,” Welter said. “It’s wasting taxpayer money to be at the table bargaining when they’re paying people to be there to say no.”
Class sizes and complexity have been an area where the government and STF have especially been butting heads.
“If you can imagine 30 six-year-olds running around, it is mayhem,” said Welter. “I teach high school and I had a class not that long ago of 36 kids. My classroom is not built for that. Once people sat down, nobody could get up and move. It was packed in like sardines. That’s not fair to students. So if I have a 60-minute class and I have 30 students, that means each student is getting two minutes of my time maximum. How is that right?
“We have more students with learning needs, behavioural needs, speech needs, motor skills, and we don’t have speech language pathologists, we don’t have psychologists,” Welter continued. “Our social workers have been scaled way back. We have anxiety and depression numbers like crazy since Covid. We have nobody to help support in that, so teachers have to become all of those things and we don’t have the time to focus in on the curriculum that we’re supposed to teach and do that any justice when we have to do all those other jobs as well. We want to do the best for our students.”
On the local level, there’s a specific formula when it comes to class size.
“Ideal class size is really dependent on a number of things—like the age of the students, or the number of grades in a room; how complex the needs are in their specific subjects,” explained Keith Keating, Director of Education with the South East Cornerstone Public School Division. “We use a staffing formula in our school division, so we drive that basically by 23 students per classroom teacher, which means we have some classes that are smaller than that, some a little larger than that. But that’s our average overall in the school division for classroom teachers, then we add in response to intervention teachers and learning support teachers to help support some individual student needs. We also look at some of the smaller schools with some that might fall out of the norm to provide other supports in those schools.”
Rising costs have also affected the school division with staff finding more ways to stretch the education dollar.
“We’ve seen inflationary pressures squeeze the ability of school divisions to manage budgets in a way that keeps all supports in place that were once there. Those dollars that are provided don’t go as far as they once did,” Keating said. “Our staff do everything they can, they do an excellent job of meeting the needs of individual students in classes, but it becomes more difficult every year with the dollars available to continue to meet those needs.”
The two days away from school has been an inconvenience for some, but Keating noted the time away would not be detrimental in the long run.
“I think it’s not always easy for families, especially those with younger children,” he said. “I know there is always an impact in learning when you miss a school day, but one good thing is we’ve been fortunate this year to have not too many weather days that we would typically have. So that’s a positive thing.”
With word of the looming action, many communities responded with local groups offering special events for students, making the best of an unplanned day off.
“That’s something that we’re very fortunate in the southeast corner of the provinces, we have very supportive and strong communities in terms of being able to support one another,” Keating noted. “So it was great to see all of those different things that were happening across the school division.”
As for what happens next in terms of reaching an agreement between the STF and government, the future is unknown.
“There’s not a single person who is standing out here going, ‘I would rather be out here in the cold with a sign walking around than be in my classroom.’ We all want to be in our classrooms, we all want to be with our students,” Welter said from the Regina line, near the north side of the Albert Street Bridge. “That’s why we signed up for this job. But we want our students to have the proper supports that they need and the only way we’re going to get that is if we make it very loud and clear to the government that we’re not backing down.”
With the uncertainty of negotiations, Welter noted the STF will remain strong in their mindset.
“Who knows what the next thing will be. If they don’t see this and don’t take this seriously, I guess we’ll be seeing more because we are not going to back away,” she said. “They’re not willing to listen to the stories, they have had thousands upon thousands of letters and emails and phone calls—most of which have not even been returned or acknowledged. I personally still have letters that I sent in September that I have not gotten even an acknowledgement of. We’re getting people’s attention and we’re going to keep doing what we need to do because kids deserve better than the government’s giving them.”
When asked his opinion on what’s needed to make talks work, Keating highlighted ‘willingness’ being the key.
“I think the best way to solve things is always to talk at the table,” he said. “[In] the conciliator’s report that came out, she noted, too, that the parties are quite far apart on many issues and the only way to come to an agreement, I think, is a willingness by both parties to meet somewhere in the middle and find common ground. And that sometimes takes time.”