Teacher shortage has schools scrambling
‘How am I going to do this?’ principal asks facing five vacancies on staff of 37
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.
“We still want to work as hard as we can to make sure that kids are getting the best education as possible, but sometimes 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.
He knows teachers and students will be hurt by pulling resource teachers away from their duties, Mallory said.
Kids who need dedicated help with certain subjects will be “put on hold a little bit” or will need to work with teachers outside of regular school hours.
Mallory refuses to be beaten down, even on a busy day when a recent power outage left the school without Internet connectivity for an indeterminate period of time — not an uncommon occurrence at the remote school.
“On the positive side, we’re banding together, working together, trying to build a formidable team,” Mallory said on a September morning shortly before classes got underway for the day.
“Everyone is really good at understanding that we were in a little bit of a crisis here, so people stepped up and it was quite easy for me to make some of those decisions.”
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-ofprovince 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.
The Northern Teacher Education Program (NORTEP) was established in 1976 so students could work on Bachelor of Education degrees while living in northern Saskatchewan. It graduated its last class in the summer of 2017 after the provincial government announced that Northlands College would take over responsibility for administering a Bachelor of Education program in northern Saskatchewan.
April Chiefcalf, a former NORTEP instructor and vocal critic of the closure, said the move was more complicated than simply handing the existing program over to new management. She said there was confusion over what housing and financial aid would be available for students going through Northlands, which led to students dropping out and fewer northern students registering to begin their teaching studies this fall. She said about one-third of NORTEP students who could have continued their studies with Northlands chose not to.
Northlands College did not respond to a request for comment last week.
Saskatchewan Ministry of Education spokesman Matthew Glover said in an emailed statement that the province “is dedicated to supporting a high-quality post-secondary education system that responds to the needs of northern Saskatchewan” and that the province is aware of the teacher shortage in the north.
“The ministry has offered to continue discussions and to support Northern Lights School Division with their recruitment and retention plans to fill these positions as quickly as possible,” he said.
“The Ministry is aware that recruitment challenges exist in many northern jurisdictions across the country.”
Mallory said he hopes this year’s shortage of teachers is a one-time anomaly, but he’s making plans to ensure his school won’t have to scramble again in the event that teacher shortages are the new normal in the north.
“What I’ll be doing next year is putting in a contingency plan in case something like this happens again so we’re not as struggling,” he said.
When hiring teachers in the future, he’ll let them know that the position they ’re applying for might not be the one they end up filling; they may be called on to teach additional classes or subjects.
For now, Mallory is cautiously optimistic the school will soon be able to hire qualified teachers who want to experience life in northern Saskatchewan.
He’s determined to make the best of things until that happens.
“We are going to use this challenge we have and we’re going to turn this challenge into an opportunity and we’re going to try to use this opportunity to get much more involved in the community, to try to get the community coming in more, to assist us with everything that’s going on and really try to build some of those links,” he said.
“So we’re going to try to turn this slight negative into a more positive.”