Chinook prepared for job action
The Chinook School Division has been preparing to deal with job action by teachers due to the breakdown of negotiations between the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation (STF) and the provincial government.
All extracurricular activities in the school division has been cancelled starting March 12 until further notice due to the decision of the STF to implement restriction of services sanction.
Chinook School Division Director of Education Kyle McIntyre spoke to media about the situation after a regular monthly board meeting of trustees, March 9. The STF announced earlier on the same day that teacher sanctions across the province were scheduled to begin on March 12.
McIntyre said STF undertook to let school divisions know at least 48 hours in advance of any kind of withdrawal of service or work-to-rule situation.
“So we weren’t surprised,” he mentioned. “We’re disappointed that this is the way that things have had to go. Unfortunately, we can’t do anything about it at our division level and so we’ve got to respect the process that’s been put in place. We’ve got to respect the STF’s position and hope that the STF and the government can work something out so that kids aren’t going to lose a provincial or regional basketball or HOOPLA, which is probably the largest SHSA event in the province.”
The STF’s Teachers’ Bargaining Committee is responsible for negotiating a provincial collective bargaining agreement for 13,500 teachers in the province. The decision to start restriction of services sanction came after unsuccessful collective bargaining negotiations and conciliation discussions between the Teacher’s Bargaining Committee and the Government-Trustee Bargaining Committee.
The parties started negotiations in May 2019, but they reached an impasse by November. The Teachers’ Bargaining Committee then applied for conciliation and several meetings took place since the start of 2020.
At the same time the STF held a sanction vote on Feb. 10 and 11 to determine the support of teachers for job action. There was a voter turnout of 96.6 per cent and 90.2 per cent of members voted in favour of sanctions.
The current sanctions that started March 12 will remain in effect until further notice. These sanctions are focused on the termination of any voluntary or extracurricular services by STF members. They will report to schools and provide professional services no more than 15 minutes before the start of the official school day and not later than 15 minutes after the end of the school day. They will continue to provide student supervision within this time frame for activities such as recess, lunch and bus supervision.
“Classroom instruction is not going to be impacted,” McIntyre said. “So teachers will still have responsibility to plan at home and to evaluate students and be prepared for their instruction, but anything that would be voluntary, like extracurricular, whether it’s drama or whether it’s basketball or whether it is badminton or whether it’s a field trip outside of the school day, those types of things will be cancelled until further notice.”
He did not anticipate that the current job action by STF members will have any negative impact on the bus transportation services in the school division.
All bus schedules will remain unchanged and the Chinook School Division has measures in place to cover a few locations where bus supervision is needed beyond the 15-minute time frames specified by the STF.
“We’re going to try to maintain that as much as possible,” he said about school bus services. “It doesn’t mean that down the road that there won’t be some other kind of sanctions and we may have to change our response, but to the federation’s credit they did let us know and we had an idea that they were going to target the work throughout the activities that are outside of the classroom, and so similarly we’ve got to respect those sanctions, but at the same time do what we can do to ensure that kids are safe and staff are safe in our schools.”
There are around 425 STF members in the Chinook School Division who are participating in this job action. The school division will evaluate and react to any other sanctions by the STF as a result of ongoing job action if the parties do not resume discussions.
“Most divisions in the province have a strike management team that will have a couple trustees and then the management of the school division to discuss how we’re going to handle any particular sanction that is shared with us,” he said. “So we’ve got to be a little bit nimble with responses, but we can’t begin to pretend that we can anticipate every sort of sanction.”
The Chinook School Division sent letters to all families about the job action, and any changes in the situation will be communicated directly to families and staff. Updates will also be posted on the school division’s social media accounts and website.