Heather Langley’s daughter Lucy is a Grade 5 student at Burton Ettinger Elementary school in Halifax. Lucy has a rare syndrome that impacts her physical and intellectual development, she is autistic and nonverbal and she has a severe form of epilepsy.
“So she requires one-on-one support,” said Langley.
“She gets support from her EPA team for toileting, diapering, feeding, drinking, mobility. Any part of the day you can imagine a person goes through, my daughter needs help with that. ”
Without that support, Langley says it would be impossible for her daughter to attend school, and that’s why she’s concerned about a possible Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) strike that would include school support workers.
“We’ve been told through a letter that there will be plans in place to send our kids to school,” she said.
“I think our school has close to 20 EPAs and I can’t imagine they have any plan to fill that gap, and I can’t imagine our kids can safely go to school without our EPAs there.”
Tantallon mom Robin Gushue has similar concerns for her daughter Olivia, a Grade 6 student at Five Bridges Jr. High.
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“She is a kid that lives with complex needs, she requires full one-on-one care all the time. If this strike happens, Olivia’s options for school are very limited.”
Gushue says an email from HRCE indicated that students in need of support would have two options. The first would be to stay home and take part in online learning, and the second would be to attend school but with more limited resources.
“They’re not great options,” said Gushue.
Both mothers say they support the school staff going on strike, acknowledging that their jobs are very complex and they deserve to be respected, valued and fairly compensated.
“I think what the general public don’t understand, at least from an educational assistant, point of view, is that their jobs are very complex,” said Gushue.
“There’s much training involved…. (My daughter’s) team had to undergo training in order to identify seizure activity and dystonia episodes.”
Many EPAs also go through training with IWK physiotherapists and occupational therapists, as well as with IWK communication specialty teams so they are able to communicate with students who are nonverbal.
That’s the case with EPAs who work with both Gushue’s daughter and Langley’s daughter. Both use complex computers to aid in communication — systems the EPAs have had to learn.
“This is not just kind of a job you can step into, this is a career and it should be the right people taking care of our children, not just some subs,” said Langley.
Langley has written a letter to the premier and education minister asking them to “recognize the valuable role all school support staff have in the successful education of all children in HRCE schools.” Her letter says that “EPAs have incredibly difficult jobs and they deserve to be paid a living wage.”
CUPE’s Nova Scotia School Board Council of Unions and the central bargaining committee representing Nova Scotia’s Regional Centres for Education and the CSAP will be in a legal strike as of Friday, April 1.
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