“The workload is verging on unmanageable.”
That’s from Prince George District Teachers Association President Katherine Trepanier as another academic year wraps up for the summer.
She told MyPGNow.com while the 2024-25 school year was pretty good, areas like School District 57 are having to use un-certified teachers more often in order to fill some holes.
“We have a lot more teachers working on what is called letters of permission. Those are people who are not certified teachers who have been hired on a letter of permission to teach – we have many more uncertified teachers working in Prince George.”
“In addition, when there is not a sub available, then the school has to pull the support teachers to cover the classes and so, students aren’t getting those services when that happens.”
Trepanier is calling on the province to do more to financially support public schools in places like ours, and it starts by filling up the teacher vacancy.
“We need the government to step up and provide some incentives for people to basically go into teaching and also make sure that the working conditions are that they teachers want to stay and aren’t leaving the profession.”
“Our schools in general aren’t getting enough funding to meet all the needs of the students. It’s a big challenge for teachers and for our school district because the province isn’t funding enough of what schools need to be able to provide education to all students.”
“I would say the biggest gaps is the funding to provide inclusive education. The BC Government only covers about 72% in the province for school districts of what schools actually spend on inclusive education. Basically, school districts are having to re-direct funding in different ways so that educational assistants can help all students,” added Trepanier.
As for how many students are in each class room within SD 57, Trepanier noted the figures by grade have held steady.
“Our district has been really good about maintaining the class size maximums, I think they have been very good about that. I think the issue is we don’t have any composition language – we don’t have any language that says if kids have specific needs that there is this amount of support or things provided.”
The current collective agreement between the BC Public School Employees Association and the province’s Teachers Federation expires today (Monday).
The last package saw experienced educators cross the 100-thousand-dollar-a-year threshold with BC leapfrogging into the top tier of teacher salaries in Canada.
The BCTF represents nearly 49,000 teachers who deliver education to students in the province’s 60 school districts.
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