In short supply of supply teachers
Peel school boards have tough time finding replacements for ill staff
Like many areas of Ontario, school boards in Peel are having difficulty finding supply teachers to fill vacancies. Bruce Campbell, spokesperson for the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board (DPCDSB), says it has been an ongoing issue for a number of years across the province, as it has been a struggle to find supply teachers to fill in when staff teachers call in sick.
In some cases, this may result in classes being merged for periods of the day to ensure students are supervised.
“Our guiding principle is always the safe supervision of the children in our care,” Campbell said. “This is always a major consideration, even on a temporary basis.”
Part of the difficulty in securing supply teachers for a day is that many of them may be registered with a number of different boards and may have already committed to another vacancy that day. School board employees across Ontario are entitled to 11 paid sick days per year, as well as120 days with 90 per cent pay. Campbell says the DPCDSB has a contractual limit of 1,600 occasional teachers in its pool while the Peel District School Board (PDSB), which has also experienced problems filling spots for absent teachers, has 3,500 in its pool. In both cases, there are occasional teachers who may choose to teach casually, as opposed to making themselves available every day.
Not having a supply teacher on hand may result in children being assigned work to keep them busy, instead of carrying on with the curriculum for that day.
PDSB spokesperson Carla Pereira says teachers on staff leave behind lesson plans in case they’re absent so supply teachers filling in can take them over. She adds that fill rates vary throughout the year and sicknesses are more likely in the fall and winter.
There may be times where the DPCDSB calls upon a wellknown parent to fill in as an “emergency instructor,” but that’s a last resort. Campbell said the board’s use of emergency instructors is limited, and those instructors go through a criminal reference check and vulnerable sector screening.
The PDSB doesn’t use parents to fill in if they can’t summon a supply teacher, but may call upon a monitor on staff, such as a lunchroom supervisor, to supervise classrooms for a short period while the school figures out how to disperse students to other classrooms.
Campbell calls upon the province to find a solution for this issue. The Ministry of Education is aware several school boards are experiencing staffing pressures and it is working on ways to address them.
“For example, we are creating two new supply and demand forecasting models (one for the French-language system, one for the English-language system) over the coming months so we can be more responsive to emerging teacher supply issues in the future,” said ministry spokesperson Heather Irwin.