A commentrary by Ilda Turcotte, the president of the Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association, and Carolyn Howe, the GVTA’s local representative to the B.C. Teachers’ Federation.
Just like our students, most teachers start every year with a case of the back-to-school jitters.
If you know a teacher, you may have enjoyed some of their tales of August’s back-to-school nightmares. (A recent one of ours was about being woken out of bed by the fire alarm and stumbling around in the dark searching frantically for the class list!)
Each year around this time, teachers ask themselves the same questions that kids do: Am I ready? Do I remember how to do this? Will my class like me? Alongside the teaching nerves is the excitement of back-to-school preparation.
Social media is full of teachers’ posts about the new ideas they can’t wait to try in the classroom, their new thoughtful seating arrangements and encouraging welcome back decoration, and of course, eager anticipation about meeting their new students.
But this is not a normal time for schools, and this year they don’t feel like the normal jitters. It has been a tough few years.
Teachers have been working under incredibly challenging conditions on the front lines of a global pandemic. We saw COVID spread through our schools and many of us got sick.
Staff are again returning to schools still waiting for their booster invitations, despite hearing that the province is preparing for a possible surge of cases this fall.
If we want to wear masks that offer the best protection against infection, we must provide them ourselves. The Education Ministry says $166.5 million has been spent in B.C. schools upgrading ventilation systems.
But in Victoria, where our ageing infrastructure and deferred maintenance is well known, only 24 individual classrooms have been upgraded. It doesn’t feel reassuring.
We are also returning to a system stressed by staffing shortages. A lack of on-call teachers and educational assistants mean when someone is absent, they may not be replaced.
Last school year in the Victoria District there were more than 900 instances of teachers away (usually for illness) without an available teacher-on-call to replace them. The number is much higher for EAs.
When there is no one to fill in for a sick employee, it leaves schools scrambling to reassign remaining staff to cover the shortage. The learning support teacher is moved to a Grade 3 classroom and so their learning support program is cancelled for the day.
On-call teachers arriving at school in the morning with their dayplan ready are reassigned into an area where they may feel unprepared. With multiple educational assistants away and unreplaced in a school, students and teachers are left to cope without the skilled and consistent support they rely on. It’s exhausting.
Meanwhile, we are all feeling the pinch of skyrocketing inflation impacting the cost of living. That’s stress most Canadians can relate to.
Everyone working in the public sector is experiencing their salaries falling significantly behind those in the private sector. For new teachers at the bottom of the salary scale and often working on-call, the income is unpredictable and inadequate in today’s economy.
A teacher in his second year of teaching relayed that he worked every day available to him, and grossed $30,000 in the 2021/22 school year. In one of the most expensive cities in Canada, this is not sustainable. It’s no wonder so many are talking of leaving the profession – or have already left it.
All of this makes an already challenging job sometimes feel impossible. But teachers are problem solvers and we know that there are solutions out there.
The BCTF is in contract negotiations pressing the provincial government to put money on the table. Teachers’ salaries need a cost of living adjustment so those coming into the profession can afford to live in the communities they work in – and those of us already working here don’t leave for greener pastures.
Workload concerns like enough counsellors and special education teachers, and smaller class sizes need to be taken seriously in our negotiations. Teachers are dedicated but we aren’t magicians. We need support to provide the education children deserve.
As we look forward to the new school year, everyone has the same hopes. We want school to be a joyful place of discovery where children and youth feel safe, cared for and excited about learning.
In a truly supported system, teachers should feel that way too.
