Depending on whose numbers you believe, and that has become increasingly difficult, many school districts are, three months into the school year, still facing a significant teacher shortage.
According to the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, at least last month, there were more than 1,000 vacant contract and teacher-on-call (substitute) positions across the province.
But Janet Stewart — the CEO of the B.C. Public School Employers’ Association, which represents the senior executives of B.C.’s 60 school districts — says the situation is not that bad.
“There are definitely challenges, and we wouldn’t want to underplay those challenges,” Stewart said in an interview with the CBC in October. “However, we definitely would not be describing this situation as a crisis or chaotic.”
In the same interview, a spokesman for the Ministry of Education is quoted as saying: “There are always vacancies at the start of the school year and about 90 per cent of positions are occupied.”
Again, according to ministry figures, there were 35,875 educators in public schools as of September 2016. Call it 36,000 now and that would mean that at the start of the school year, B.C. school districts were looking for almost 400 teachers.
Applications from other provinces were welcome, but Canadian teachers certified in other provinces and those certified internationally have to apply for certification through the Teacher Regulation Branch to work in B.C. public schools.
And that takes time.
All this in a public-school enrolment environment that, according to ministry figures, is growing by about 5,000 students each year and will continue in the foreseeable future to need even more teachers and more classrooms.
Speaking outside an East Vancouver elementary school on Sept. 5, Education Minister Rob Fleming said that about one-third of the new class spaces are portables. In Surrey, for example, about one in eight students is taught inside a portable classroom.
And that is just skimming the surface of a problem that was finally solved in November of 2016 when the Supreme Court of Canada, after 15 years of court battles between the B.C. Teachers’ Federation and the then provincial government handed down a decision that restored class size (the number of children at various grade levels in classrooms ) and composition (the number of children with identifiable special needs in each classroom) to the levels that had been unilaterally and ill-advisedly ripped from the 2002 contract.
That left school districts to deal with an enormous problem — how to find a significant number of competent teachers and classroom spaces to get reorganized for school opening September 2017.
That should have left plenty of time — right?
Not really.
To begin with, the number of teachers graduating from teacher training institutions did not begin to touch the number needed in some districts.
Some districts even hired retired administrators to recruit teachers — from anywhere — only to find that ballooning rental and real-estate prices in many areas of the province make selling and moving to another place financially impossible.
That was complicated by the fact that teachers often come in family groupings of two, and depending on the nature of the positions needing to be filled, there might not be a guarantee of a job for the recruited teacher’s spouse.
Giving up half the family income prevented many teachers from accepting offers.
Teacher absences are covered by “teachers-on-call” who, under normal circumstances, had applied for positions in one or more districts and are waiting for full- or part-time employment.
Many districts have been forced by the court decision to decimate their teacher-on-call lists to fill the newly created vacancies. That leaves the lists woefully short and facing a situation in which an outbreak of influenza can cause chaos.
But only now do we get to the real problem.
A summary of all available studies accumulated over the past 40 years on key education drivers finds that undeniably it is teacher competence that improves instruction and student performance.
How and by whom can hundreds of teachers, hired quickly to fulfil the court’s requirements, be vetted for competence?
Stay tuned because there are educationally sound solutions out there, but they cost money — the same kind of money that has been wasted on legal wrangling for the past 15 years because of an ill-considered government decision in 2002.
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
