Teachers will be in short supply this September, as school districts across the province struggle to fill new positions.
Province-wide, districts are looking to hire more than 2,000 new teachers. In Chilliwack, 37 new divisions are required for elementary schools alone. That means dozens of new teachers and extra support staff.
“We’re really struggling to hire teachers and staff,” Gerry Slykhuis, Chilliwack School District secretary treasurer, told the school board on Monday night. They’re also juggling space within schools and seeking more portables to accomodate all of these new divisions.
This all comes after a Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) ruling in favour of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation that ruled to restore contract language and class-size and class-composition that was deleted in 2002. The decision found the B.C. government acted wrongly when it stripped such limits from teachers’ contracts.
Now, school districts are scrambling to make do with what they have, and everyone is pulling from the limited pool of available teachers.
Chilliwack has offered up moving bonuses to teachers coming from out of the area. The full cost is still unknown, as it will depend on hiring. Some of the positions have already been filled, with partial funding provided by the province shortly after the SCC ruling.
The Ministry of Education (MoE) paid out two short term funding solutions, called Teacher Education Funding and Priority Measures. That allowed for the hiring of 25.6 FTEs and 32 FTEs respectively. That money will not be available next year, but funding to entirely restore class size and composition will.
That funding is now being referred to as a Classroom Enhancement Fund (CEF).
The MoE has estimated Chilliwack’s “notional allocation” at $5,682,547. But Slykhuis says in reality the cost will be closer to $8.7 million. That includes 37.3 elementary teachers FTEs, 41.7 secondary teacher FTEs, and 4.5 teacher librarian FTEs. Chilliwack already has more counsellors than required in the restored language, at 22.5 FTE positions. About $700,000 of the total will go toward the overhead costs of having that many more staffed classrooms.
•See related story: Class sizes restored, exacerbated Chilliwack crowding issue