Metro Vancouver school districts have started hiring about 500 new teachers who should be in classrooms early next month.
About half of a $50-million interim deal reached earlier this month between the government and the B.C. Teachers’ Federation will go to Metro districts to hire new teachers. The other half will be spread out throughout the rest of the province. The interim deal was a first step in the implementation of the BCTF’s win in the Supreme Court of Canada.
Next year, and going forward, the number of teachers required is expected to be even higher after the nation’s highest court restored clauses in teachers’ contracts about class-size limits, specialist teacher ratios and the numbers of special needs students that can be in a class.
The provincial Ministry of Education provided a breakdown for every district in the province. Surrey, the district with the most students in B.C., will get $6.2 million, or enough for about 136 teachers. Vancouver, the second largest district, will get $4.4 million, or enough to hire more than 90 teachers. Coquitlam will get about $2.7 million, enough to hire about 60 teachers.
Surrey’s first job posting as a result of the ruling is for 30 full-time learning support teachers, 20 integration support teachers and five elementary counsellors. Applications were due Monday and all of the teaching positions will be focused on supporting students with special needs. Surrey expects to post 50 more teaching jobs before the end of the month.
As of Monday morning, 70 internal applicants had already applied for the jobs, but the numbers of external applicants was unknown.
In both Vancouver and Surrey, management and the teachers’ associations were involved in the decisions, as is required in the interim agreement.
In Vancouver, the district will be looking to hire about 95 full-time teachers. Where those teachers will work will be decided by consultation between the schools, the district and the Vancouver Teachers Federation, said acting superintendent John Lewis. There are 110 public schools in the city, so each one may see about three-quarters of a full-time teacher added, although Lewis said the allotment would be based on need, not on a uniform amount per school.
The Vancouver School Board will try to fill the positions by moving part-time teachers up to full-time positions, where possible, Lewis said. The new teachers may be classroom teachers or non-enrolling teachers who could “team-teach” in three or four classrooms. Lewis expects most of the resources will go toward supporting special needs students and that he thinks there will be “challenges” trying to recruit for some positions like school psychologists and speech-language pathologists that can be in short supply.
Nonetheless, Lewis said the district is “delighted” to be able to hire more teachers and wants to get as many of them in place, “as soon as possible.”
