A new school year is always a time of excitement and anticipation.
B.C. teachers are busy organizing lesson plans, brushing up their skills with professional development workshops, and setting goals for the year ahead.
At the same time, they are bracing for another tough year. The teacher shortage wasn’t solved over the summer, and classrooms are increasingly complex.
And yet, the scale of the problem in British Columbia isn’t well defined. Without province-wide figures, it’s hard to know how the problem will be solved.
Recently, Quebec’s Education Minister confirmed that province is short close to 8,500 teachers. It’s evidence of the power of political will, and British Columbia school communities deserve the same hard data from the provincial government and school districts.
We know it’s a serious problem. We hear from our members that they are facing higher workloads and more stress. In our random-sample survey of members, 82 per cent reported feeling direct impacts from the teacher shortage. The top concern they reported was being unable to get their students the support they needed.
Teachers care, and when there aren’t enough of them, students pay the price.
We also have an idea of the long-term forecast.
The B.C. government’s Labour Market Outlook Report estimates an additional 64,500 education workers — including elementary and secondary teachers — will be needed over the next 10 years to account for increasing student enrolment and retiree replacement alone.
But what does it look like now and how can we prioritize funding to support schools today?
Parents deserve to know how often their kids’ music class or counselling session is cancelled because specialist teachers are being pulled into classrooms to cover staffing gaps. How many classrooms across the province will be empty next week because there isn’t a teacher available to staff it? How many uncertified teachers are being hired and how much has that number grown over time?
