January always brings its share of problems, not the least of which are the credit-card bills requiring you to make good on those impetuous financial decisions you made in December — the ones that seemed like such a good idea at the time.
That is exactly the position the provincial government finds itself in after a well-documented 15-year legal battle with the B.C. Teachers Federation over a 2002 ill-advised decision on the part of government to arbitrarily strip certain provisions regarding class size and composition from the teacher contract.
The Supreme Court of Canada has ordered those provisions to be restored. Pay now or later, but pay.
The multiple consequences of that decision are well beyond the purview of the court, but we’ll get to that.
What was the cost of 15 years of legal proceedings to the public purse? Not the court’s problem, either, and nobody else seems to know. Finance Minister Mike de Jong is on record saying he does not know how much the court cases have cost taxpayers. However, he added, he wouldn’t dispute the Supreme Court case alone is “maybe in excess of $1 million.”
The first step in the restoration will be the hiring of 1,100 new teachers at an estimated cost of $50 million.
That solves a large part the government’s problem — just pay the bill and write it off as another expensive policy stumble similar to the health-care firings or large-scale IT failures.
But the fire-ready-aim agreement between the BCTF and government to hire the new teachers as a first step in satisfying the Supreme Court decision is just the beginning of what will probably be a six-month and beyond nightmare for school districts.
Greater Victoria school district superintendent Piet Langstraat is quoted as saying that while no firm estimate has been determined, it is anticipated 35 to 45 teachers will be added to the district’s teaching staff. Using old student/teacher funding formulas, Sooke is hoping for 18 to 22 teachers and Saanich as many as 13.
All very good news, but those 66 new teaching positions might require 66 classroom spaces for just those three school districts.
But even that is not the really big problem. Hiring a teacher is probably the most significant decision most school districts make. This is a person you are authorizing to have an almost immeasurable influence on the education and lives of thousands of children over the next 20 or 30 years.
Applications must be thoroughly vetted, interviews conducted, references checked, reports on competence (if they exist) reviewed, appropriate fit for school and district needs considered and, sometimes, academic credentials, especially for specialist jobs, verified.
School districts will have a list of teachers-on-call, some of them long-term, and local teacher associations, of whom TOCs are members, will insist that those teachers be given first preference. There will be a stack of applications from young, ready-to-change-the-world newly trained but short-on-experience grads from teacher-training institutions.
It is no exaggeration to say that doing a conscientious job of hiring a single teacher can easily consume at least a full morning’s human resources work, if not more, before any hiring decision is made.
HR people are only too well aware that a sloppy hiring process can result in a long-term nightmare of classroom problems, less than satisfactory teaching reports, union grievances, mediations and arbitrations.
Facilities people and HR people will, as school district administrators always seem to do, find ways of dealing with the ramifications of bringing in 66 new, thoroughly checked, properly accommodated new teachers. Across the province, the same will somehow happen.
School district trustees and administrators will examine the Feb. 21 provincial budget with a wary eye. Too many times have school districts been told, following a government initiative, to “find the funding from within existing resources.”
A reported suggestion from the minister that they should immediately begin hiring for the remainder of 2016-2017 school year will be viewed with caution before appropriate supporting documentation arrives.
As with those credit-card bills, the full amount of remuneration required by the Supreme Court decision is not required in a single payout. Provincially, we’ll be paying for the 2002 decision, one way or another, for a while yet, but let’s hope 1,100 new teachers will breathe fresh air into the system.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
