BC Teachers’ Federation gears up for negotiations in contract year

The excitement of sending kids back to school is being tempered by issues already being flagged in the classroom. The BC Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) is outlining concerns as it prepares to hammer out a new contract with the provincial government.

Negotiations aren’t slated to begin until the spring, but the federation explains preparations are already underway.

“I don’t think it’s a secret that we’re facing a really severe crisis of shortage of teachers, shortage of workers in the education system, in general,” explained Clint Johnston, president of the BCTF.

He didn’t provide an overall number but he says staffing is so thin across the board, for both regular teachers and specialist educators, that it can be challenging for teachers to get a day off.

“Compensation isn’t what it should be. Certainly, we get decent pay and lots of the public looking at us think our pay looks not too bad, but you do a lot of education to get here, and the cost of living is going up everywhere. We have teachers who can’t afford to live in the communities they teach in,” he explained.

“But it’s more than that. We’re not producing enough teachers here. We need to train more teachers, but overall, you need working conditions, you need a job that people look at and say, ‘I want to do that for 30 years,’ and right now that’s not the case.”

In other words, improved recruiting and retaining of teachers in B.C.

Johnston says whichever party wins next month’s provincial election will need to figure out a plan to strengthen education in this province, which will include classroom composition.

“We need to look at how many kids are in classrooms. How many people are available to provide supports. Counselling — there’s a growing awareness everywhere of the need for counselling, so we need more of those kinds of specialists,” Johnston said. “There’s a lot to be done in the contract, but outside of that, we need a government [to come] in and create a workforce plan for education that says, ‘Here’s the money, here’s how it’s going to be put out, and here’s the problems it’s going to solve.'”

In this year’s budget, the province announced it was investing $968 million to shore up staffing in classrooms and $255 million for a special fund to hire teachers, special education teachers, teacher psychologists and counsellors.

“The raw numbers are big, but what are you investing as a society, as a province into the education of your future and that is diminishing as a percentage of what this province, overall, has.”

Johnston thinks political parties running in October’s election do care, but he wants them to listen to their needs and put hundreds of millions of dollars more into the education system.

“Money is a pretty big issue for everybody and we did have a pretty decent contract last time, but it’s worth bearing in mind that what that contract did really was just keep us from going backwards too far and before that contract, we had many that didn’t keep up with the pace of the increase of cost of living at all,” he explained.

“So, there was an effective salary cut for quite a few contracts in a row, so we’re looking to make some advances now so that members see a true raise, not just something that barely keeps them at the same level.”

The current contract is in place between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2025. It includes annual wage increases worth a few thousand dollars, depending on a teacher’s role.