Belmont Secondary’s music students had their big end-of-year concert on Thursday. Alas, some parents missed it, as the performance had to be moved to the afternoon from the evening because of the teachers’ dispute.
Likewise, the school’s dance academies had to call off their evening shows at Spectrum Community School’s theatre next week. Instead, they’ll squeeze in a matinée performance at Belmont on the last day of classes, though not all the dancers can take part due to academic commitments.
A group of parents has also arranged to stage the dance show at a private school later this month (there’s irony in there somewhere). Grade 12 student Hope Robinson fears one important person will be missing, though: “Our teacher — I don’t think she’ll even be allowed to come.”
The tug of war between the government and the B.C. Teachers’ Federation also means teachers may not take part in Belmont’s grad ceremony at the University of Victoria on Saturday. They can sit in the crowd with the parents if they like, but no organizing, no announcing students’ names, no making sure the kids take the door to the stage and not the one to the boiler room. No familiar face waiting in the wings to straighten Robinson’s mortarboard. “It’s going to be a bit empty backstage without them,” she says.
And please, don’t even think about what will happen if a full-scale walkout occurs, as could be the case as early as June 16 should next week’s strike vote pass. Belmont students are due to begin taking provincial exams on June 19. Will the kids be asked to cross picket lines to take tests overseen by administrators? Will teachers give them enough pre-exam prep time? The results can be critical to a student’s future.
“I can hear people panicking every day,” says Robinson, who is supposed to write English 12 and Social Studies 11 exams.
This isn’t the way she was meant to finish her public school education. Robinson, who spent two years in the dance academy, spent months practising for next week’s shows. Now they’re out the window and the rest of the calendar is in question. “It feels like a really big letdown.”
What a rotten thing to do to an 18-year-old. The thing is, Robinson’s story is typical. She is just one student, and Belmont is just one school. Multiply their stories by close to 1,600 public schools around B.C. and you get an idea of how much angst and disappointment this never-ending struggle is inflicting on its collateral casualties.
“You feel like you’re caught in the middle but there’s nothing you can do,” Robinson says. “It really does feel like you’re stuck between two divorcing parents.”
We’ve been hearing that divorce analogy a lot lately, but it’s not quite accurate. Warring parents eventually split. The BCTF and the provincial government just keep going at it like the Canadiens and Bruins, year after year, without resolution.
And just like Habs and Bruins, they can flail away safe in the knowledge that the referees will eventually step in before too much damage is done.
Public sector workers don’t really have the right to strike, just the right to inconvenience briefly before being legislated back inside.
In addition to forcing the teachers back to work a couple of times, the Liberals did it to the nurses and bus drivers in 2001, ferry workers in 2003 and hospital workers in 2004. Ambulance paramedics were allowed to strike for seven months only because essential-service levels were set so high that the public didn’t feel a thing; the province still forced them back prior to the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Only once since provincewide bargaining was introduced in 1994 have the teachers and their employers reached a deal without government intervention. It doesn’t matter which party is in power — the New Democrats stepped in to end or prevent labour disputes in schools in 1993, 1995, 1996, 1998 and 2000.
It’s a broken model, a pattern that is as maddening as it is predictable, repeated over and over. This ritualistic dance is more practised than anything the Belmont students could put on stage.
