Saskatoon public schools to close over lunch Thursday as teacher strikes escalate
Half-day kindergarten, pre-kindergarten programs are not affected: official
Saskatoon's 47 public elementary schools will close over lunch on Thursday, the school board says, as teachers across the province plan to refuse voluntary noon-hour supervision duties that day.
All Saskatoon Public Schools (SPS) schools will also be closed to their more than 28,000 students for the entire day on Wednesday, as part of a second set of rotating strikes by the Saskatchewan Teachers Federation (STF).
The escalating STF job actions mean SPS won't have the 371 teachers it needs to supervise younger students over the lunch hour on Thursday, division director of education Shane Skervjen says.
"As a result of the withdrawal of noon supervision on Thursday, the school division cannot ensure the safety of students during lunch because teachers will not be available for lunch supervision," he wrote in a letter to students and families, dated Monday.
Elementary students will be required to go home at lunch time, and are welcome to return for afternoon classes, according to the letter.
Students who take the bus to school will be bused home at lunch time, but there will be no bus service to return them for afternoon classes or to bring them home at the end of the day.
At-home learning materials will be provided to students whose families opt to keep them home for the afternoon, Skervjen wrote, and several school schedules and end times will shift.
Half-day kindergarten and pre-kindergarten programs are not affected, he said.
"As a school division, we respect the collective bargaining process. Our number one priority is the safety of our students and maintaining a focus on student learning," Skervjen wrote.
"We are committed to keeping parents, caregivers and families informed of future job action and changes to school operations."
Thursday will be the fifth job action taken by the STF since January, as both the union and the province blame the other for the continuing bargaining stalemate and acknowledge the serious effects on students and families.
Those disruptions have prompted several childcare centres and other facilities to offer one-day camps for students, raising concerns from one Saskatoon parent who says the inconvenience is the point.
While well-intentioned, Colleen Slade says the child-care offers are a "short-term help, but long term [are] causing a little bit of damage."
"We need to be making those things inconvenient for people so that employers, businesses, get behind our teachers — that they start putting pressure on the government and rallying support," said Slade, whose spouse is an SPS teacher.
"None of us wants to be inconvenienced … but we kind of have to be if we want things to improve for our children."
On Monday, STF president Samantha Becotte said she did not consider these short-term offers as crossing the picket line, noting that child care is not the same as teaching students curriculum.
'In for a long fight'
Slade's concerns highlight the delicate balance the STF is trying to strike with its job actions, according to Daniel Westlake, an associate professor of political science at the University of Saskatchewan.
"Their strategies [are] clearly designed to try to maintain public support for the teachers — to be somewhat disruptive, but not to have the kinds of full disruption that come with a full-on running strike," he told CBC's The Morning Edition on Tuesday.
The STF is pushing for the next contract to address growing class size and complexity issues, and include wage increases indexed to inflation.
The province, which says it has offered a seven per cent raise over three years, says salary issues are holding up bargaining.
Education Minister Jeremy Cockrill has also said class complexity and size issues are best addressed at the school division level, not in a one-size-fits-all collective agreement.
Former SPS board chair Ray Morrison agrees solutions need to be developed and implemented locally, but says the province needs to increase long-term funding for school divisions, which he says are caught in the middle of the current stalemate.
"If education, in my opinion, was funded appropriately or sufficiently, then we probably wouldn't be facing some of these issues," Morrison told CBC's The Morning Edition on Tuesday.
Westlake says that with polls showing strong support for both teachers and the Saskatchewan Party government — plus a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that makes it harder to legislate workers back to work — the two parties "are in for a long fight."
"It's hard to tell how this ends," he said. "My instinct is that it doesn't end soon and it doesn't end quickly or cleanly."
With files from Jason Warwick and The Morning Edition