The Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation (STF) and province were supposed to begin bargaining talks this week, but that’s been postponed.
Originally, the two sides were going to come to the table on August 28 and 29 for the first round of talks. They won’t meet now until September 17 and 18 in Regina.
It’s a move STF president Patrick Maze called surprising, as the August dates were agreed to back in May. Now, the two teachers on the STF bargaining committee will have to be at the table while school is in session.
“Two of them would have had professional development going on or activities in school this week they would have got out of,” Maze said.
“Pushing the dates forward now means that they’ll have to miss some time with students, which is unfortunate.”
He added that they will be able to work around the shift, calling bargaining the STF’s top priority.
Don Hoium, chair of the government’s trustee bargaining committee, said the dates are being rescheduled due to challenges around trustee availability. He said this will allow more trustees to be at the table when talks begin.
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The current STF contract expires on August 31, 2019. It covered the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years, with a one per cent pay increase for the roughly 13,500 educators it affects.
In this round of talks, the STF is bucking tradition and putting their bargaining chips on the table before talks even begin.
Their main priorities are pay, alongside classroom size and composition. Maze said this is the first time he’s seen an issue tie pay when they surveyed STF membership.
Their pay request is an eight per cent raise over three years: two per cent in 2019-20, three per cent in 2020-21 and three per cent in 2021-22.
Teachers have been vocal about challenges around classroom size. This intensified after Education Minister Gordon Wyant said the average class size was 18 students in rural schools and 21 students in urban schools.
Maze said that is far from what teachers experience in the classroom, and why they want to negotiate a formula to determine class sizes and available resources.
“We know that a hard cap right across the province isn’t the answer. Having the opportunity to have the federation sit down, and in certain situations, it might be the addition of an educational assistant, in some situations it might be the addition of a teacher to alleviate multi-graded classrooms,” Maze said.
“In some situations, it might be a requirement that we might reduce the class size.”
The STF has been vocal in saying there are increased challenges in the growing amount of English as an additional language students. Maze said teachers can’t properly teach students if they don’t understand the language.
Registration is still open for schools across Saskatchewan for the 2019-20 school year, so early data on enrolment growth and class size likely won’t be available until late September.