Supporting Education at Algonquin Lakeshore Catholic District School Board
During this time we all need to think about what we are willing to lose before we will take job action. This is proving to be a difficult round of bargaining so everyone needs to be prepared to answer this question.
What are you willing to give up? Wages? Benefits? Job Security? Unpaid Days (VLAP, bereavement, personal leave…)? Pension? Vacation?
TORONTO, Ont. – Representatives of Ontario school board workers say they look forward to helping to shape and preserve vital elements of public education in Ontario. The statement was made on the day that their union served notice to bargain in school boards across Ontario, where CUPE represents workers in 110 bargaining units.
The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) represents 55,000 school board support workers in Ontario. In May, their members voted to participate in central bargaining with the Ministry of Education and school boards and earlier this month, Ontario’s Education minister issued a regulation that designated CUPE as the bargaining agent for its members.
“We are looking forward to meeting with representatives from the government and trustee associations as soon as possible to start the negotiations process,” said Terri Preston, chair of CUPE’s Ontario School Board Coordinating Committee (OSBCC).
“Our members are seeking a contract that respects the work that they do and fully recognizes their roles in making schools work. We are mobilized and ready to bargain.”
Jim Morrison, CUPE coordinator for the OSBCC, continued: “The ministry will participate at the central table and all the players have clearly defined roles in the bargaining process. Under this model, we hope to make gains that benefit our members and also help to ensure the future of public education in Ontario.
“Through collective bargaining, CUPE will present workers’ concerns and issues to both the ministry and employers. And throughout this process, we will signal our plans to protect public education through a strong collective agreement.”
We have decided to move up the General Meeting that was originally scheduled on June 14th at 9:30 to June 7th at 9:30. There are two important issues that will be addressed at this meeting. We will be doing a vote to see if the membership support the merge Unit 1 and Unit 2. If the consensus is “yes” we will be putting it on our list for negotiations. The other issue that will be addressed is the upcoming provincial election that will be taking place on June 12th. We need ALL our members to go out and vote, a s well as their family and friends. Make sure on June 12th to put your “X” beside your local Liberal candidate.
A detailed agenda will be available soon!
Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak’s dropping of ‘right-to-work’ leaves the door open to pushing an anti-worker agenda by other means, says the head of the Ontario Federation of Labour.By: Sid Ryan Published on Tue Mar 04 2014. Click here to view the original.
Tim Hudak’s alleged reversal of his controversial support for American-style “right-to-work” laws lacks all credibility. It is the sort of cagey claim that is reminiscent of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s now notorious statement: “I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict of crack cocaine.” Of course, Mayor Ford was intentionally deceiving voters about his drug habits, while the truth fell somewhere between the questions reporters asked and the careful wording of Ford’s qualified answer.
On Feb. 21, Hudak, the leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives, promised the Toronto business community that his party would not “change the so-called Rand Formula” that protects union dues collection and guarantees union resources for representing their members. The media eagerly reported that Hudak had “reversed his position,” “flip-flopped,” done a “U-turn” or “bowed to unions,” but nothing could be further from the truth. Like Mayor Ford, the reality of Mr. Hudak’s intentions lies in what he didn’t say. His promise comes with a wink and a nudge.
Let’s be clear: overturning Justice Ivan Rand’s 1946 decision was never explicitly part of Hudak’s message because, as he ominously boasted to his business audience, “Our agenda is a lot bigger, and a lot more ambitious, than that.” So, his pledge not to undo this foundational labour policy is neither a retraction nor a reassurance. It intentionally leaves the door wide open to accomplish his anti-worker agenda through a variety of other means.
For 18 months, Hudak’s Tories have been promising to import the meanest, most divisive anti-worker laws that the United States has to offer. While he has cloaked his strategy with murky and misleading doublespeak about the need for “flexible labour markets” and “labour law modernization,” Hudak’s intensions have always been clear: eliminate the organized opposition of workers and implement a low-wage, regulation-free haven where corporations can rake in profit at the expense of Ontario workers, communities and the environment.
Even if workers were to mistakenly believe Hudak’s pledge to not tear up the Rand Formula, they most certainly cannot trust him to leave workers’ rights intact. Hudak’s party has promised to make it more difficult to join a union and possible for individual workers to opt-out of their collective agreement. These measures would divide workplaces and have the net effect of gutting the entire basis of the Rand Formula, while allowing him to remain true to his word.
Hudak has also made clear that he would take his anti-labour agenda much, much further. He has promised to freeze public sector wages, gut pensions for public sector workers and reduce public services through staff reductions that would hit schools and hospitals.
He would follow Alberta Premier Alison Redford in removing the third-party arbitration system that supports fair collective bargaining for front line emergency personnel who do not have the right to strike, like police and fire fighters. He would curtail workers’ from using union dues for workplace training and he would silence his opposition by restricting unions from engaging in political advocacy.
These measures would draw Ontario into a race to the bottom led by America’s 24 right-to-work states that now boast some of the lowest wages in the land. It is an agenda that no Ontario worker can afford and a scheme that would not only divide workplaces and communities, but has already divided the Tory party itself.
If there is anything to be learned from the American example, it is that the advocates of these extremist policies do not waiver or retreat from their low-wage agenda. They view economic re-engineering as a game of chess and if public outcry prevents them from doing it in one move, they will try it in three.
Hudak’s scheme is cribbed right out of the Republican playbook and just like Mayor Ford, he certainly won’t let the truth get in his way.
Sid Ryan is president of the Ontario Federation of Labour.
Food Service workers at Trent University need our help!
The CUPE Peterborough Area Office is asking for your support to message Trent University by clicking on the tab below.
Please forward to your membership and other supporters.
In Solidarity,
Grant Darling
Trent University
Support Food Service Workers
Your immediate help is needed. In less than two weeks Compass Group Canada is set to take over food services at Trent University.
Despite initial assurances by the University that the new company would respect the current collective agreement, CUPE has now learned that Trent’s Food Service Workers are being asked to take drastic cuts to their already modest rights, wages, benefits and working conditions.
Please support Trent’s food service workers by clicking this link<http://cupe.us7.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=156003c53a9d3962e31946813&id=6566a256cb&e=543041b1de> to send an automatic e-mail to Trent University’s president to demonstrate your concerns and demand they take action.
Also, please share with all your contacts and ask them to do the same.
Time is of the essence – your help will make a big difference.
Click Here to send your message<http://cupe.us7.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=156003c53a9d3962e31946813&id=7893b95209&e=543041b1de>ing
The Globe and Mail
Thu Apr 3 2014
Byline: Erin Anderssen
eanderssen@globeandmail.com
There are a lot of people disappointed with the results of Ontario’s full- day kindergarten program. According to a just-published study that compared the students in the first three years of the program, it hasn’t translated so far into better scores in reading or math at the end of Grade 1. The kids aren’t doing worse, but academic benefits are what everyone has focused on, because that’s largely how the $5-billion-a-year program was sold by the Liberal government. (Even the author of the study, Janette Pelletier, a child development expert at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, says that the “fade-out” early learning measurements was a surprise.) Critics who call it “expensive babysitting” and think little kids should be at home more (a tricky feat when so many of their parents are working), are full of “I told you so’s.”
But hold on. It’s true that full-day kindergarten has not – at least not yet, anyway – transformed the province’s youngest scholars when it comes to early reading and writing scores, as a story by my colleague Caroline Alphonso pointed out last week. But the study suggested that kids maintained an advantage in other social and cognitive areas essential for school success. Their parents were also less stressed, and, in surveys, reported improvements in their kids on nearly every early learning measurement. All of which raise some important questions about the program that go beyond test scores:
1. Isn’t reducing family stress a legitimate reason for a social program?
The study conducted a “parental hassle survey” and found that parents were significantly “less hassled” if their kids were in full-day-kindergarten – which will comes as no surprise to any family that has tried to juggle half-day school with full-time work. Household stress also has a negative effect on long- term student achievement – to say nothing of the health of families in general, and the benefit that comes from facilitating work, especially for low-income parents and single moms, who have struggled most with child-care costs and logistics. What’s more, parents are happy with the program and report seeing a benefit in their children. Why aren’t these results seen as equally valuable to, say, boosting results on standardized tests?
2. What is happening in Grade One?
By almost every social and cognitive measure, the full-day kids had an edge over their half-day peers going into Grade One – but lost that advantage by the end of the year. Researchers are not yet sure why this is but some suggest that the more formal teaching structure in first grade may not be capitalizing on the benefits of play-based learning – something many educators hope will change over time.
3. What measurements really matter for future academic success?
Students in full-day kindergarten significantly outscored their half-day peers in two important areas: vocabulary and self regulation, which includes the ability to focus, follow instructions and co-operate with peers. Those gains held up through Grade 1, and, some research suggests, in the long run have a larger effect on adult outcomes. (Another plus: The more kids who arrive to class with these skills, the better the learning environment is for everyone. )
4. Now that we have a benchmark, how can we improve the program?
It’s hardly realistic to expect an education change requiring a huge cultural and curriculum shift for teachers, and major school reorganization, to transform student outcomes from day one. “It would be naive to expect a new approach to work on every dimension right away, and there is always room for improvement,” says Pelletier. What’s clear in the study is that some significant kinks still need to be worked out. In particularly, some classrooms have too many students.
There’s a shortage of early childhood educators, which means, according to Kerry McCuaig, an early childhood researcher also at OISE, that sometimes principals have to pitch in to cover absences. Co-operation between teachers and the ECEs now sharing their classrooms continues to be an issue. These are problems, however, that will take time to fix.
Even so, we would be wrong to expect that full-day kindergarten will fix all problems for every child, and perhaps both experts and politicians should have been more cautious about overselling it, especially at the beginning. A universal system offered to all families will not produce the same results as the targeted, specially designed interventions for disadvantaged children often cited in U.S. studies. Sweden took decades to create a preschool system that earns praises around the world (hopefully, we can learn from them and go faster). Given the size of the investment, we need to ask critical questions about the program without making hasty leaps. Ideally, ongoing research will reveal how we can make improvements, not just to the kindergarten program, but the next grades as well. For now, at least one group appears happy to reward the program an A-plus: the families actually using it.
(c) 2014 The Globe and Mail Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Saturday, April 19, 2014 News / Queen’s Park
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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.
