TDSB giving pandemic bonus to principals, vice-principals

Toronto board’s perks for administrators to cost more than $2 million

Administrators to receive a week’s pay, plus lieu days, at a cost of more than $2 million. Teachers union calls it an ‘outrage,’

Toronto’s public school board is spending up to $2.4 million in bonuses for its principals and vice-principals to thank them for their work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The board — which just last week said it had significant concerns about its budget given the costs of the ongoing pandemic — informed administrators of the perk Friday, saying it will be paid out by Dec. 10.

The additional pay was met with “repugnance and outrage” by the local high school teachers union.

But Toronto District School Board (TDSB) spokesperson Ryan Bird said that “in order to meet additional requirements for a safe reopening of schools in September, principals and vice-principals were required to attend work earlier in August compared to previous years. To recognize these additional days, principals and vice-principals will be receiving 3.75 days pay at their regular rate. This is equivalent to five days of the daily rate for a summer school principal.”

He said “while exact numbers are not available, the additional pay is expected to cost approximately $2.2 to $2.4 million,” and that some administrators are also now allowed to carry over lieu days that went unused because of the pandemic and labour unrest last school year.

Vice-principals in Toronto can earn about $110,000 or more a year, and principals up to about $135,000.

Toronto is not alone in providing the bonuses. The Hamilton

Wentworth District School Board said because it recalled administrators a week early from their summer-long vacation it would “compensate accordingly.” That, along with the board’s other COVID compensation costs, has a price tag of $750,000.

Leslie Wolfe, president of the Toronto local of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF), wrote to associate directors Andrew Gold, Karen Falconer and Manon Gardner expressing “repugnance and outrage at the TDSB’s decision to provide monetary and lieu time recognition in thanks to only managers while ignoring frontline workers.”

She said “teachers and education workers have spent literally hundreds of thousands of hours planning, re-planning, preparing, re-preparing, and then starting all over again as the TDSB’s constant changes to program delivery models, inability to provide timetables in a timely manner, and other organizational missteps resulted in jerking them from one assignment to the next. We too have members who answered the call to support school opening in August. We too have members who are owed lieu days from the 2019-2020 school year.”

She is now urging the board “to repair the damage you have caused to the relationship between yourselves and your teacher and education worker employees, and to show the same spirit of munificence to deserving teachers and education workers as you do to their managers, since administrators’ accomplishments are of course meaningless without the tireless work of OSSTF members.”