Learn from teacher battle

It has been a long, strange trip, but B.C. could be at the end of a journey that began when the government ripped up teacher contracts 15 years ago. Years of conflict and wasted money are behind us, and we can only hope the BC Liberals have learned from their compounded mistakes.

The government and the BC Teachers’ Federation reached a tentative deal on restoring contract provisions that the government took away unilaterally in 2002. Courts have ruled the province’s high-handed treatment of the contract was unconstitutional.

BCTF president Glen Hansman said the deal would mean more librarians, counsellors, specialeducation instructors and Englishas-a-second-language instructors, if union members approve the agreement. Class sizes are expected to drop.

The problems began when the Liberals, under Gordon Campbell, yanked class-size and composition provisions from the teachers’ contract, saying that such aspects of the job were the purview of the government. Things that had been negotiated suddenly were not part of contract talks.

The teachers fought back through the courts, a court sided with them, the government brought in a new law and finally the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in November that the new law was also unconstitutional.

Governments sometimes have to push the limits to make important changes, but that doesn’t include killing things just to see what happens.

In this case, what happened was a protracted court battle, job action, disruption of schools, increased animosity and wasted money, all to get us back to where we started. And the government has to cough up hundreds of millions of dollars to hire enough teachers.

As many people have pointed out, a generation of children have gone from kindergarten to Grade 12 in the midst of this battle and its fallout. The extra teachers and specialeducation instructors who might have made a difference in those students’ lives weren’t there.

The tentative agreement was reached between representatives of the BCTF, the BC Public School Employers’ Association, the Public Sector Employers’ Council Secretariat and the B.C. Ministry of Education. It is subject to a vote by the province’s 41,000 teachers, which began on Wednesday and ends today.

But even if it is approved, the province’s 60 school districts won’t be magically transported back to 2002, even with the $300 million the union estimates the government will have to spend.

Under the 2002 contract language, class sizes were capped at 20 students for kindergarten, 22 for Grades 1-3, 28 for Grades 4-7 and 28 for Grades 8-12.

The caps are currently 22 for kindergarten, 24 for Grades 1-3 and 30 for Grades 4-12, with room to go beyond 30 if circumstances demanded.

Restoring those ratios will mean hiring more teachers, plus librarians, counsellors and special-education specialists, and finding classroom space for all of them, which will strain the resources of school boards, no matter how happy they are to see the new staff.

None of this turmoil had to happen, and those who created the mess — including Premier Christy Clark, who was then education minister — have to make sure the school boards get as much help as they need to clean it up.

The teachers have taught the government something, but we can all learn from the past 15 years.— Victoria Times Colonist