Uncertain times in N.S. education
An anxious uncertainty hangs over the province’s public school system.
“Our education system is in a very fragile state right now,” said Halifax school principal Jacqueline LeVert. “If we keep having uncertainty and chaos, it only hurts the children. That’s the most disconcerting thing. Students suffer when there is uncertainty, students suffer when the adults who are supposed to help them don’t know where the system is going and how they will be affected by it.”
Education Minister Zach Churchill, too, spoke of uncertainty when he met with reporters Friday afternoon.
“Change breeds a high level of uncertainty, particularly where there are structural and administrative changes happening and that uncertainty has led people to believe that there are worst-case scenarios that could happen.”
The structural change was prompted by the province’s decision to accept all 22 recommendations of an education report from Avis Glaze. The report advised the elimination of the seven English-language school boards, to be replaced with one provincial advisory council made up of people appointed by the minister. The report also recommended removing principals and vice-principals from the Nova Scotia Teachers Union and placing them in a separate professional association.
“That isn’t, of course, the case that people who come out of the union won’t be protected, that their salaries and benefits will not be there,” Churchill said in describing some of the misinformation that is out there. “That’s not the case. We’re just going to keep working to get accurate information out.”
Despite a report that educators who are openly critical of the Glaze recommendations could be disciplined, Churchill said no such directive was issued by his department.
LeVert, principal of the Primary to Grade 5 Ecole Beaubassin school on Larry Uteck Boulevard, said the uncertainty has pushed her toward a decision to return to the classroom as soon as possible despite the minister’s promise that administrators will be given a year from the passage of new education legislation next month to make up their minds.
“I can’t trust that in that year my choice will still be there, that I will have much choice on what classroom I go into,” said LeVert, who works with 600 students at Beaubassin. “I think I will have less choice in a year.”
LeVert, who has been an administrator for 10 of her 25 years as an educator, said a move back to the classroom would result in a personal pay cut of about $15,000 per year.
“No amount of pay is worth taking a risk of staying in a position with no support,” she said. “Taking the perplexities and the hardships that we face, we need moral support, we need legal support, we need our union to be there to help us through the most difficult times. We need resilience, we need access to mental health resources that are there for us right now. Some of us are not willing to take that risk.”
LeVert doesn’t buy the argument that having teachers and their supervisors in the same union is problematic. Instead, she considers it a working bonus.
“When you start from a collaborative approach, you can be a supervisor and you can help people, help them be better teachers and you can also have the difficult conversations that need to be had,” LeVert said. “I’ve had those and we’ve had positive change. That’s why I have never felt that because I am in the same union as the people I was supervising that it has stopped me from doing my job as a supervisor. Never.”
The teachers union has said that it will take a strike vote on Tuesday in response to the province’s unilateral changes to the system. The union indicated it would consider some sort of job action and a source has said that the union strategy may be not to disclose the results of the online vote.
Last year, the union deployed a work-to-rule strategy, withdrawing extracurricular services in protest of the government’s decision to impose a contract on the 9,600-member NSTU.
“I don’t want to hypothesize on what the vote is going to be on Tuesday,” Churchill said when asked what the government might do in reponse to a potential teacher walkout or work-to-rule campaign.