Teachers’ groups in the Greater Victoria and Saanich school districts say their members have not been paid for the day after a contract was ratified to end teachers’ provincewide strike.
The majority of other teachers in the 60 school districts across the province have been paid for Sept. 19, said Jason Gammon, Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association first vice-president. He said it was a Friday that many teachers used to prepare their classrooms for the first full post-strike week of school Sept. 22-26.
On top of that, many teachers spent unpaid time during the weekend of Sept. 20-21 making preparations for the week ahead, Gammon said.
“Teachers were dedicated. They wanted to be back in class.”
The main stumbling block for payment is that districts’ contract language for calculating how teachers are paid varies around the province, he said. In Greater Victoria and Saanich, pay is determined by subtracting the number of days not worked from 20, which is the monthly average.
“We’ve dealt with this before and done the same thing,” said Greater Victoria district superintendent Sherri Bell. “This has nothing to do with the Sept. 19 prep day. This has to do with applying the collective-agreement language.
“We don’t have a choice. We can’t pick and choose when we follow the collective agreement and when we don’t.”
Bell said the Ministry of Education made it clear that each district should follow its own contract language when dealing with post-strike matters. There was no funding from the ministry to do something outside the contract, she said.
Saanich Teachers’ Association president Mark Skanks said he has been talking to district officials about the non-payment.
“I’ve acknowledged to Saanich, ‘I know you’re doing the contract correctly,’ but I think I have a lot of members that are upset because, of course, they know other teachers in other locals who have been paid for eight days [in September] as opposed to seven.”
Greater Victoria and Saanich are among about a dozen districts where teachers are still hoping to be paid. “Other districts that have similar language to Victoria have decided to pay,” Gammon said. “It’s kind of a goodwill gesture. We came off a pretty brutal strike and that’s how you want to start things off?”
Teresa Rezansoff, president of the B.C. School Trustees Association, called for all teachers to receive pay for Sept. 19.
“BCSTA strongly encourages government to consider the relatively small cost of honouring its commitment against the ill will and negative impact of not funding that one day,” she said in a letter to Education Minister Peter Fassbender and Finance Minister Mike de Jong.
Teachers earning at the top of the pay scale lost $10,000 to $12,000 before taxes during the strike, and another unpaid day is hard to take, Gammon said. The pay for one day ranges considerably, he said, starting at around $250.
“We’ve said to our teachers: ‘This is an important issue’,” said Gammon, who was scheduled to speak about teachers’ concerns at Monday night’s Greater Victoria school board meeting.
Fassbender said the settlement negotiated with teachers made it clear teachers were to be paid starting Sept. 19. “The challenge, and the Victoria district has said this, is the individual collective agreements and the wording of them,” he said. “So it is a local issue and I know school districts are working on them.”
— With files from Katie DeRosa
