The New Brunswick Teachers Association says it takes issue with the accelerated timeline for “changes” to the French immersion program scheduled for the fall of 2023.
Connie Keating, the association’s president, said the board met and discussed the new timeline, which she said was originally planned for 2024.
“What the board has actually taken issue with is the timeline,” she said in an interview Monday. “We have been involved in a consultation process or known of the timeline and those timelines have been altered … moved up a whole year.”
In his resignation letter, former Education Minister Dominic Cardy revealed the government had plans to eliminate French immersion by September 2023, and newly appointed Minister Bill Hogan later clarified it would apply to new entrants and not the ones already in immersion.
However, Keating said the education system is under pressure and it is creating instability, pointing directly to a teaching shortage.
“For the last year or more, actually, we have been seeing a decline in the number of supply teachers in the system,” she said. “As a result, that’s creating a significant strain on the system.”
Keating said illnesses including COVID-19 also continue to impact the education system.
“Teachers and school staff in general will become sick and have to be absent,” she said.
In addition, she said the government has made some changes to the curriculum that requires teachers to leave the classroom for the proper training.
“We are concerned there is an insufficient supply of teachers, especially in rural areas to cover the need,” she said, adding that results in less quality education and service to students.
The association said in a statement on Oct. 21 that trust has been broken and the association would no longer be “engaging in the formal consultations until such time a mutual collaborative consultation process is in place.”
A report on second language learning from provincial court Judge Yvette Finn and former deputy education minister John McLaughlin earlier this year suggested scrapping French immersion in favour of a new program available to all incoming students. The report said that while the program has a 90 per cent graduation rate, more than 60 per cent of anglophone students aren’t in the program.
It also said the program can act as a form of streaming, as most children with various forms of learning difficulties aren’t in it.
The Canadian Association of Immersion Professionals is also concerned about the elimination of the French immersion program, including the accelerated program.
Chantal Bourbonnais said eliminating it will only make it harder for those who want to be bilingual.
“We are very concerned about the recommendation of doing way with French immersion,” she said in an interview Monday. “It’s very, in our view, very counterproductive and the impact of such a decision will have an impact on bilingualism.”
Bourbonnais added access to the program in rural parts of the province is a particular problem, and asserts that research shows that immersion is the best way to be fluently bilingual.
“I think that the problem is not in the delivery of French immersion programs, but how they are understood, how they are managed and targeted,” she said. “French immersion still has things that we need to do better but I think that we can do better, we can try stuff, we can do things differently but the math is the more hours of French you have the more you’ll be able to speak French.”
The Department of Education said Minister Bill Hogan is open to sitting down with the association.
“We are focusing on building a new approach for students who are entering kindergarten and Grade 1 and maintaining stability for those already in immersion for September 2023,” a spokesperson from the department said in a statement. “The change in timing minimizes the overall impact on the education system by allowing students a slow and easy transition.”
The statement said it’s goal is make sure students can come away with conversational French. “We want to move away from a system that streams students into two paths, towards one where every learner is supported – no matter where they live or what their learning style is,” the statement said.