Northern schools short 14 teachers
Some teachers and support staff in northern Saskatchewan’s provincially funded schools are taking on extra duties to ensure students can still go to class in spite of a “highly unusual” teacher shortage.
Jason Young, director of Northern Lights School Division, said the division is still looking for 14 full-time teachers to work in the communities of La Loche, Sandy Bay, La Ronge, Pinehouse Lake and Stony Rapids.
In the interim, vice-principals and resource teachers in the communities are being pulled away from their regular duties to teach classes.
“Definitely it is a burden on the staff,” Young said.
Northern Lights School Division had hoped to employ 331 full-time teachers for the 201819 school year. By the end of last school year, 97 positions were vacant. Eighty-three of them were filled over the spring and summer, leaving 14 vacancies.
The division typically has one or two vacancies at the beginning of the school year, but to have 14 is “an anomaly,” Young said.
“To see this many this time of year is highly unusual, so it’s prompting us now to give some thought to recruitment strategies, retention strategies.”
He said a big part of the problem is that teachers who had agreed to contracts backed out “at the last minute” because they were offered jobs elsewhere, often closer to their own homes.
Young said this underscores the need for a robust teacher education program in the north, so people from northern Saskatchewan are trained to be teachers in their own communities.
The Northern Teacher Education Program (NORTEP), which was established in 1976, graduated its last class in the summer of 2017 after the provincial government announced that Northlands College would take over responsibility for providing higher education in northern Saskatchewan.
Some students who spoke out against the closure said there was confusion over how teacher education would work without NORTEP, which led to some students opting not to take the Northlands program.
“There is a perception out there that, with NORTEP closing, it’s a fear of many that this trend (of not having enough teachers) will continue if we’re not proactive with a teacher retention and recruitment strategy and also a teacher education program in the north,” Young said.
In an emailed statement, Matthew Glover, a spokesman for the Saskatchewan Ministry of Education, said the ministry has offered to support the Northern Lights School Division with recruitment and retention plans.
With regards to the effects of NORTEP closing, Glover wrote “there has been no reduction in the availability of teacher education training programs in the north. Government continues to fund programs in La Ronge and La Loche. The Government is dedicated to supporting a high-quality post-secondary education system that responds to the needs of northern Saskatchewan.”
Patrick Maze, president of the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation, said parents and students should be “hugely concerned” by the teacher shortage. He said asking teachers to do more when schools are short-staffed could further exacerbate the shortage.
“If you’re a teacher that goes up with all the best intents and suddenly you are in charge of two or three classrooms because of a shortage, that’s not a sustainable situation,” he said.
Young said applications for vacant positions are “trickling in,” but he doesn’t have a sense of when all posts will be filled.
“I’d rather have the internal coverage and screen the candidates so we have the candidates we think would be a good fit for us as opposed to just filling the positions just to fill them,” he said.