By Jondrea Liddie
A provincial plan to mandate teachers’ supervision of extra-curricular activities and increase their workloads is an “attack on the teaching profession,” says an Ottawa-Carleton teachers’ union president.
“If the province insists on demanding extra work and less preparation time for no pay, what do you think the reaction will be? ‘Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full?’ Not bloody likely,” says Tony Pearson, president of the Ottawa-Carleton local of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation.
“This is an attack on the teaching profession and an attack on students,” he says.
Education and Training Minister Janet Ecker and Premier Mike Harris have upset teachers by threatening to further increase their workload by requiring them to handle seven courses a year instead of six, and only one preparation period.
That, Pearson says, leaves them very little time for the supervision of extra-curricular activities.
He says many teachers will lose their jobs and those who remain will be overloaded with work.
Mitchell Beer, a member of the parent group Our Schools Our Communities, says the province doesn’t recognize what the teachers now do on a voluntary basis.
“Harris and Ecker are trying to portray teachers as lazy so-and-sos who watch the clock and leave school at 3:30 p.m.,” he says. “Very few of them are like that. The vast majority of teachers that I’ve met give heart and soul and go way over time and do a lot of stuff at their own expense after the budget runs out because of their dedication to the job.
“That’s why they went into teaching,” says Beer.
Karen Cairns, the head of the physical education department at Lisgar Collegiate, has been coaching for 25 years and doesn’t see the need for the province to mandate her involvement with extra-curricular activities now.
“I think it’s absolutely ludicrous. The province keeps downloading everything to the teachers,” she says. “A number of teachers have been volunteering for most of their career and I don’t think it needs to be mandated by the province. They keep expecting us to do more and more.”
Cairns worries about liability and safety:
“People are forced into coaching situations where they aren’t qualified. That’s my main concern — the safety.”
Don Lawson, also a teacher at Lisgar, coaches three sports.
He is retiring after this year but says that if he were to return, he would only have time to coach one team at the most.
“The idea with coaching is it was something you liked to do and you would do your sport,” says Lawson. “But if you’re being mandated, basically the essence is you’re being told that you’re going to do this. And there’s not a whole lot of volunteerism or goodwill in that particular sense.”
Lawson says the province keeps talking about mandating and enforcing but teachers haven’t seen anything in writing, nothing concrete.
“We’ve just heard a lot of stuff verbally, so who knows,” he says. “But the way they’re saying it and the attitude that they seem to have, it’s creating a lot of negativity.”
Beer says that if teachers are “pushed to the wall,” they’ll react and the net result is going to be that a lot of them may opt not to volunteer in the future.
Beer says things are already stretched to the limit.
He says there are going to be more kids falling through the cracks and short of the government turning around its education policies, “the only hope of holding it together rests with teachers.”
The teachers’ union is now weighing its options for job action in response to the plan. Among the options are a work-to-rule campaign and a province-wide strike.