Northern schools scramble to fill teacher vacancies
SASKATOON It wasn’t until a few days before classes started that the principal of Sandy Bay’s community school learned he would be short more than 10 per cent of his staff.
The northern Saskatchewan school of roughly 520 students in kindergarten to Grade 12 has a budget to hire 37 teaching staff. But when the first day of school rolled around at the beginning of the month, principal Randy Mallory was told he was short five staff members.
“It’s incredibly frustrating because ... You have everything planned and ready to go and then, all of a sudden, you’re running around trying to come up with a contingency strategy to make sure that every student is taught,” Mallory said.
“That becomes challenging when you have to run around and fill these positions and decide, how am I going to do this?”
Hector Thiboutot Community School, located at the end of a gravel road about 600 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon, is missing a Grade 7 teacher, two Grade 8 teachers, a Grade 9 teacher and a teacher to lead a land-based education program the school had hoped to launch this year.
To ensure classes continue as smoothly as possible, the school has combined some of its grades into larger classes and hired members of the community to serve as teaching assistants.
In the past, the school has been allotted funding to hire 13 teaching assistants.
This year it is hiring 19. Resource teachers who were brought on to assist students with math and reading have been called upon to teach classes; Mallory’s two vice-principals are teaching high school students.
Mallory said he was prepared to take on a class himself.
“I asked, but (my staff ) told me, ‘No, you’ve got to man the ship,’ ” he said.
Hector Thiboutot Community School is one of five provincially funded schools in four northern Saskatchewan communities that remains short teachers as classes stretch into their third week.
The Northern Lights School Division is still searching for 10 teachers to fill vacant positions.
When classes started on Sept. 4, the division — which had hoped to hire 331 teaching staff — was short 14 full-time teachers.
Jason Young, director of education for the division, said northern Saskatchewan’s provincial schools often have one or two vacancies at the beginning of the school year, but such a large number of empty positions is “highly unusual.”
Teachers in northern Saskatchewan are paid the same as their counterparts in urban centres, but receive a northern living allowance and often get subsidized housing and compensation for moving expenses.
Young said he doesn’t think paying teachers more to work in the north would solve the teacher shortage on its own.
He said a big part of the problem this year was that many out-of-province teachers who had been hired over the summer backed out of contracts at the last minute, often after they had been offered jobs closer to home.
Young said the province and school division need to work harder to attract and train northern Saskatchewan residents to be teachers, because people from northern Saskatchewan are most likely to stay in communities where teachers are needed the most.