President's Message

Hello, and Merry Christmas Season.

It’s hard to believe, from looking outside, that Christmas is around the corner. Hopefully, everyone is able to enjoy the last few days before the holiday break.

There have been challenges this year and issues that are on most meeting agendas. Violence in schools continues to be on a sharp incline, and it is the topic of many meetings both locally and provincially. Documenting incidents by staff and engaging in a plan for progressive discipline is the expectation from the office. Follow-up by principals continues to fall short, and it’s this communication that is key to developing and implementing safety plans for students that are effective. The office appreciates the feedback we receive from teachers as this helps inform our advocacy.

Collective bargaining continues at a frustratingly slow pace with January 10, 11, and 17 as current dates and we await dates in February. Many teachers have expressed their feelings towards this process, and I want to let you know, we hear you. This bargaining cycle has been like none other, and I’m not sure the model that is emerging with other affiliates is one that we want to duplicate in future rounds. The position of the Association is that staying at the bargaining table is the best way to deal with most of our priorities.

We want to acknowledge those teachers that have attended general meetings, acted as Association and Health and Safety reps, sat on unit committees, and volunteered their time beyond their classroom responsibilities. Those that are able to devote what little time they have beyond their massive workload for their students and teacher colleagues are recognized and thanked.

With that, we would like to extend our warmest wishes, during this season, to you and your families. We hope everyone stays safe, healthy, and takes the time needed to recharge with family and friends.

Merry Christmas to all, and God bless.

Josh

What's in a Number?

Preemptive to what follows, as a teacher, it is understood that a student is embodied by many wonderful characteristics that make them unique unto themselves, and their demonstration of learning occurs across a rich spectrum of assessments employed in a teacher's practice. Teachers know that a child is not defined by any singular data point, and that standardized tests are merely a "moment in time" snapshot, a number as predictive of a child's future as the tea leaves at the bottom of a Timmies cup. 

Simply stated, a student's skills and competencies cannot be accurately captured in a single test given the complexity and depth of each child's understanding of the world. Any analysis of test scores and assessment data must always be taken with a grain of salt, for on the other side of the numbers are beautifully diverse children with immeasurable talents and attributes that make them special.

Elephant in the Room: Austerity's Impact 

Following the global financial crisis of 2008, the Ontario Liberal government, faced with significant budgetary deficits, embarked on what they touted to be the path to economic prosperity funded through deep cuts to spending on government services. Teachers who have been around this gig long enough might recall the Drummond Report, which made recommendations to the former Liberal government to cap spending on public services, with healthcare and education bearing a target for many of the cuts. To the Education budget, specifically, a key recommendation made was to hold the line at increases of 1% per year between 2010 and 2018.  Austerity became the guiding force of budget cycles, and schools were made to do far more with increasingly less support. Some things never change, it seems.

Now, more than a decade since 2012, austerity continues to be the mantra of the education budget, and its stranglehold has played out through an erosion of the programming and services which Ontario's students rely upon to retain their competitive edge as they prepare for the jobs of tomorrow. For Ontario's teachers, the strip-backs ramped up in earnest in 2012, and they were deep. Years of wage freezes. Grid freezing. Lost retirement gratuities. End of sick day banks. Restructured sick leave. The list goes on. Impacts to teachers, impacts to students. Prosperity through austerity did not include the education sector. A deeper dive into it, in fact, would reveal that austerity has been an underlying philosophy to education funding across North America these past 3 decades, playing an integral part of the orchestrated campaign to dismantle public education in Canada and the USA...but that's another article for another day.