With an additional 3,624 students in New Brunswick’s school system, teachers are struggling to address the increasing mental health challenges among the student body.
“Several of those students are coming from countries where there is war happening or civil unrest of some sort. Certainly those students are coming to use with a number of needs. Traumatic experiences … they have learning challenges, just getting used to our system can be very challenging,” Connie Keating, president of the New Brunswick Teachers Association, told Global News in an interview on Monday.
She explained that anxiety and other mental health issues were also on the rise with Canadian students due to the pandemic.
“The current issue however is on a daily basis there are many positions that go unfilled due to absences of teachers, and it’s being backfilled because of the
shortage of supply teachers by our guidance counsellors, our resource teachers. So when those things happen, then they need to postpone the supports that they’re providing to students,” Keating said.
Between pivoting back and forth between online learning at the height of the pandemic and chronic unfilled teacher absences, she said teachers were already under resourced.
Her association is calling on the provincial government to invest part of their budgetary surplus into education immediately in order to address the understaffing and the enrolment increases.
Keating said her organization has not had a chance to speak to Bill Hogan, who was instated as the minister for Education and Early Childhood Development on Thursday following former minister Dominic Cardy’s departure the same day.
Global News reached out to the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development for comment and did not receive a response as of 2 PM on Tuesday.
Liberal opposition leader Susan Holt provided Global News with a statement on Tuesday, saying: “I have been listening to the teachers, and they are stretched so thin. With more students than ever, as well as increasing mental health issues, diverse needs, and administrative demands, teachers, schools and students need support. We’d love to see this government listen to teachers and tell us how they will address their resource needs.”
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