Saturday, April 19, 2014 News / Queen’s Park
Tim Hudak accuses Liberals of letting ‘union bosses’ run education system
Tory Leader Tim Hudak accuses Premier Kathleen Wynne of being too close to union bosses, says his government would bring in laws to put teachers in their place.
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Richard Brennan / Toronto Star Tory Leader Tim Hudak and Progressive Conservative education critic MPP Lisa MacLeod spoke to reporters at Queen’s Park
“The teacher unions are not there to run the education system,” Hudak told reporters at Queen’s Park Wednesday.
Education Minister Liz Sandals made light of the “hysterical reaction” to teachers.
“They see a teacher and they see a union boss, some sort of hysterical reaction . . . (where) we have had really positive conversations with the teachers’ leadership,” she said later.
Still stinging from losing a motion in the legislature Tuesday that would have imposed additional work on teachers, Hudak scolded the Liberals and the New Democrats for siding with teachers in opposing the motion rather than parents and students.
“We owe it to students and parents to raise the bar . . . but we’re not going to do that by handing the keys to power over to the union bosses in our education system,” Hudak said.
“Last night’s debate shows that Premier (Kathleen) Wynne and the Liberals are again taking their marching orders from the teacher union bosses,” he said. “Quite frankly they’ve got no better friend in the premier’s chair, there is nobody closer to the teacher union bosses than Kathleen Wynne.”
Wynne and Sandals have said the Tories are only interested in creating chaos in the education system.
“I have no idea why Tim Hudak and Lisa Macleod want to make this into a negative story,” said Wynne with respect to the resumption extracurricular activities in the public high schools.
The motion introduced by Tory MPP and education critic Lisa MacLeod would have redefined the role of teachers by forcing them to perform certain duties, such as attending parent-teacher interviews, completing report cards and helping students with extra work after school hours. It addition it would prevent union leaders from threatening members with fines and embarrassment if they don’t follow union directives.
Teachers now are not required to participate in after-school parent-teacher interviews and are required to fill out report cards only to the best of their ability, which during the recent labour strife over extracurricular activities often resulted in one-line answers.
“Parents should have a right to a parent-teacher interview after three o’clock outside school hours. Two, it is dead wrong for the teachers unions to be able to able to bully classroom teachers with threats of $500 fines if they stay after school to help the kids . . . coach the football team or do the drama club,” Hudak said.
Hudak said a Tory government would take much of what was in the motion and put it into legislation, even though he suspects there would be serious push back from the teachers, reminiscent of the bitter disputes between the former Harris Progressive Conservative government and teacher unions in the late 1990s.
“We stand with classroom teachers, we stand with parents, we stand with taxpayers. That’s the big difference between us and the other two parties,” he said. “I expect the unions to always fight any chances they are going to lose power in the system.”
NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said Hudak’s idea of putting out a fire is to throw gasoline on it.
“You can’t solve a problem by throwing gas on it,” she said.
Hudak said fundamental changes have to be made to the law governing teachers “so this doesn’t keep happening over and over again. They have a right to strike but they don’t have a right to hold hostage students and parents in these work-to-rule actions. There is nothing extra about extracurriculars.”
The Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF) and Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) withdrew from extracurricular activities earlier this year when the Liberal government imposed contracts on the public elementary and high school teachers that froze their wages for two years and took away paid sick days, among other things.
The OSSTF just last Friday agreed to a deal with the government that it restart extracurricular activities, leaving ETFO the lone holdout.
Have you ever wondered how the ALCDSB is allocated funds? Every year the Ministry of Education puts out the GSN, Grants for Student Needs report. In an email from Paul O’Donnell he states that:
The main “B” memo is not posted on the ministry website yet–interested parties can keep a watch here:
http://faab.edu.gov.on.ca/B_Memos_2014.htm
But some useful documents have been posted on the ministry funding page:
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/policyfunding/funding.html
You can see your board’s total allocation, including a breakdown for each major grant in the GSN, in this document: School Board Funding Projections for the 2014-15 School Year, available here:
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/funding/1415/funding15.pdf
There is also a report on the ministry’s School Board Efficiencies and Modernization consultations. The report includes CUPE’s recommendation that boards might save money by having custodial staff do simple preventative maintenance. It also explores savings that might be achieved by combining “back office” functions (which we did not recommend!), and goes so far as to say “a joint human resources/legal team might be more cost-effective for managing collective agreements.” However, the paper has no specific recommendations on back office savings.
The ministry is acting on the report’s recommendation to promote more efficient use of school space, by: reducing top up funding for schools with low enrolment; increasing funding for combining elementary and secondary schools in one building; providing new capital funding as an incentive to consolidate schools; providing funding to increase boards’ capacity to plan for more efficient use of their schools.
There is a report of the School Board Administration And Governance Grant Advisory Group that makes several recommendations on changing how money to support board admin and governance is allocated. None of the recommendations appear to impact our members who provide IT, secretarial, clerical and other board office support.
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/funding/1415/BAAG_Report.pdf
The ministry is promising a new board admin and governance funding model will be unveiled that will be revenue neutral across the province, but which will result in some board allocations going up and others down. The impact of the changes are being phased in over 4 years.
Special education funding is being changed, and there is a paper explaining the changes. It is long and tortuous, but the essence is the ministry is finally moving away from funding the High Needs Amount using historical claims and moving towards using more recent data. Like the board administration funding, change is projected to be revenue neutral across the province but will have an impact on individual boards, and thus the change is being phased in over 4 years.
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/funding/1415/2014_15SB04.pdf
And lastly the webcast briefing (for school board officials) has just been posted, which I really should read before saying much more about the GSN. There will be more to come from me tomorrow. But I should flag for you that the ministry is taking the position that the 97 day delay in grid movement will be caught under the statutory freeze provision of the labour relations act (OLRA), and if no new agreements are reached by Sept 1, grid movement will be delayed. Thus the GSN provides no funding for grid movement. It is a curious approach for the government to take: wouldn’t it be more prudent for it to assume that agreements will be reached before Sept. 1 and that the settlements will revert back to grid movement occurring when the collective agreements specify?
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/funding/1415/webcast2014.pdf
It will be interesting to see now that the allocation of funds has been announced how our school board’s support staff will be effected. With a change to the funding model for Special Education it will be interesting to see if EAs will see a positive or negative result. Another interesting observation will be to see if the ALCDSB will take advantage of the incentive to combine grade 7 and 8 into high schools as they have done with St. Paul’s Catholic School in Trenton.
The link below will take you the 2014/2015 school Year Education Funding Memo that was sent to all Directors and Trustees in the province. It breaks it down per board where money is being allocated.