Kids are hurt by teachers’ attitude to sick days

Teachers are calling in sick far more often. And our students are suffering as a result.

That’s the conclusion of a five-year study by School Boards’ CoOperative Inc., which assembles data for boards across the province.

From 2011 to 2016, absentee rates of board employees have increased by 29 per cent. In the past year alone, it increased by 9.5 per cent.

This is “debilitating,” the study says.

“The degree of absenteeism that is being realized across the province within the school boards systems is, intuitively, having a negative impact on student achievement.”

Locally, public high school teachers are not calling in sick more often. But Catholic high school teachers are.

In elementary schools, teacher absences are escalating faster in Waterloo Region’s public schools than in Catholic schools.

The average local elementary teacher took 10 sick days in 2015-16, up from just over eight sick days in 2013-14. That’s a 21-per-cent increase in three years. What’s going on? Teaching has always been a reasonably stressful job, but there aren’t signs that it has become more challenging lately. There haven’t been any major public health crises. Class sizes haven’t increased.

What has changed is the policy around sick days. Starting in 2012-13, Ontario’s teachers were no longer allowed to bank unused sick days in exchange for a cash payout at retirement. (They now get 11 annual sick days at full pay as well as provisions for longer-term sick leave.)

That’s sensible. Sick days are for when you’re sick. They shouldn’t be used as a savings plan.

But many teachers weren’t happy to lose the entitlement. The response, for some, has been to use up their full allowance of sick days, whether they’re actually too sick to work or not. Use it or lose it, right? It’s hard to believe that respected professionals, who are so well treated by the public with their high salaries, rocksolid job security and plenty of vacation time, would act in such a petty, self-serving manner. But these numbers don’t lie. This behaviour hurts children in two ways.

First, no matter how good a substitute teacher is, he or she is not going to be as effective as the regular teacher. The substitute doesn’t have a connection with each individual child, so the course of learning is disrupted.

Second, the budgets to pay those substitute teachers have soared. It costs $230 a day to hire a supply teacher. To pay for the extra salaries, school boards raid budgets for classroom supplies. This further impoverishes children’s education.

Representatives of the elementary public teachers’ union and the Catholic teachers’ union say the increased absentee rates have to do with stress related to rising levels of violence in schools. They say there isn’t enough help handling children with special needs or who have behaviour problems.

But when Education Minister Mitzie Hunter discusses the absentee problem, she doesn’t talk about rising violence in schools.

Instead, she promises “attendance support programs” and “the promotion of a healthy work culture.”

We all want children to be well-educated. Across the province, enrolments are falling. Test results in Waterloo Region are slipping. Yet the bill for taxpayers keeps rising. What are we actually paying for?