Ottawa's largest school board says it is bracing for about $30-million dollars in cuts and some 300 teaching positions as the Ford government changes to education roll out.
But the board adds that a healthy surplus and increased enrolment could help soften the blow. If Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford wanted a focus on mathematics, this is certainly challenging school boards to solve the "X" factor: how much money will they get, how many teaching positions they will lose and what will classrooms look like going forward.
“From my point of view, you can either wring our hands or roll up our sleeves,” says Lynn Scott, the Chair of the Ottawa Carleton District School Board
At first glance, Ottawa's Public school board says it appears the funding shortfall will be about $32-million dollars over four years; $22.4 million of that due to class-size changes. And that could translate into a reduction of up to 300 full-time equivalent (FTE) secondary teachers, between 10 and 20 FTE elementary teachers and up to 40 FTE early childhood staff.
“But because the province has chosen to do this this through attrition,” says Scott, “I can confidently say that we will not be issuing any layoff notices. We may in fact be hiring more teachers because we will be seeing some growth (in enrolment).”
It's a message the Ford government has been pushing.
“This system was broken when we took over government,” Ontario Education Minister Lisa Thompson told reporters today in Toronto, “and the fact is we are working with school boards and labour partners so that we can get it back on track.”
The Ontario Secondary School Teachers Union in Ottawa says it is not convinced of that and warns these changes will come at a cost.
“Students will lose opportunities for classes,” says Nancy Akehurst with the OSSTF in Ottawa, “opportunities for extracurricular stuff such as technology classes, music, arts. Either way the students will lose, whether by teacher positions or by course selection.”
School boards in other parts of Ontario are claiming hundreds of teaching jobs will be lost.”
Ottawa's Catholic School Board said it hadn't yet determined the full impact and wouldn't speculate.
But Joel Westheimer, Research Chair in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa says it is easy to speculate what the outcome will be for students as class sizes grow.
“Education is the best investment the province could make in our future,” Westheimer says, “It is not about whether teachers are losing their jobs; it’s about class sizes and the diminishing opportunities for students to take a broad range of classes. We all know from research and common sense that when there is a smaller class size, teachers have the opportunity to interact with students more and it is that teacher/student relationship that matters in education.”
The public school board chair says the province is still consulting on these changes. Lynn Scott hopes if boards provide good evidence they can still sway decisions.
