More job action set for Saskatchewan teachers after 1-day demonstration

The next day for job action has been announced by the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation with five days’ notice.

Jan. 22 (Monday) is the date set for the next round of job action for teachers, but details about the job action won’t be given until 48 hours prior.

Thousands of teachers, parents and students came out to support teachers’ job action Tuesday as part of the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation one-day strike.

Discussions between teachers and the provincial government for a new bargaining agreement reached a standstill, with neither side willing to budge.

The Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation (STF) has called for things like classroom size and complexity to be part of the bargaining talks but Education Minister Jeremy Cockrill has said he refuses to include that in the discussion.

1:28 STF brave frigid temperatures to rally for more support

Cockrill said issues around class sizes are best dealt with by local school divisions.

“That is a line in the sand for government that we’re not going to be moving on,” Cockrill said Tuesday.

He claimed that what the teachers are asking for is taking that decision away from school divisions.

“We have 27 locally elected school boards for a reason. If we’re going to put management issues like classroom size and complexity in a bargaining agreement, why have school boards?”

Cockrill admitted that there were challenges in classrooms across the province but said there needs to be local school board autonomy.

The one-day demonstration took place across 40 locations in the province,

STF president Samantha Becotte and Canadian Teachers’ Federation president Heidi Yetman delivered more than 3,300 letters addressed to Premier Scott Moe and Cockrill at the Saskatchewan legislature on Tuesday.

Becotte added that more than 11,000 emails encouraging the province to go back to the bargaining table were sent to Moe and Cockrill in less than a week, and more than 7,700 people attended the demonstrations on Tuesday.

1:56 Schools converting extra spaces into classrooms to manage overcrowding

The letters were from parents and teachers outlining issues in schools.

“The minister of education says that issues like class size and complexity are best dealt with locally. We agree, but local boards cannot address these issues when they are dealing with a decade of budget cuts and drastic underfunding from the provincial government,” Becotte said Wednesday.

“We cannot solve these issues with more committees or one-off pilot projects in a small fraction of our schools. We need irrefutable commitments and long-term funding, and our best option to hold government accountable is through our collective agreement. The conciliation board agrees that these are bargainable items. Yesterday, Canadian Teachers’ Federation president Heidi Yetman shared that many provinces have negotiated class size and complexity articles, so this is not a novel or new idea.”

The Saskatchewan School Board Association has refused to comment on the matter between teachers and the province, saying that it represents boards on the Government-Trustee Bargaining Committee and deferring questions to the Ministry of Education.

Becotte argued that the province currently sets the budget for education and that school boards have to fit within that budget, adding that having classroom complexity and size be a part of the bargaining process only strengthens school boards’ abilities to make decisions around those topics.

“We hear school boards talk about the underfunding of education and the difficult decisions they’re forced to make because of underfunding that doesn’t meet the rate of inflation.”

She said what the STF is looking for is to have teacher voices be a part of that conversation, saying they are the ones on the front lines working with kids.

Becotte said this wasn’t an easy fix and wouldn’t be solved in one year, but that they needed to see improvements.

“Our proposal that we put forward as an opening position was really intended to be a minimum standard.”

She said having this baseline would allow parents and students to understand what their minimum expectations for education in Saskatchewan would be and would allow local school boards to allocate resources to their region’s specific needs.

More to come.