Government reannounces increased funding for student assistants in NL schools
The provincial government announced on Thursday, May 2, as it did in the budget this spring, that it will increase funding for the number of student assistants in the K-12 public education system by $3 million, which would add 104 full-time equivalent positions.
Education Minister Krista Lynn Howell told reporters outside the House of Assembly about the funding, saying one of the top issues identified in a recent teachers think tank was classroom composition and that student assistants play a direct role in that.
“After the think tank we were able to immediately identify 25 additional resources for that student assistance and recognizing the value of that we've enshrined that now and included that in our full commitment to build on that workforce,” she said. “It'll offer a stabilization of that workforce.”
Howell said they heard stories of student assistants who worked split shifts, with part in the morning and part in the evening, and this funding will ensure shifts will be at least five hours long.
“The split shifts won't be as difficult. It'll stabilize that workforce and will ensure that a student assistant can follow a student for the full day, and they won't have to move between two different student assistants, which allows them to have more continuity, build a relationship and keep growing in that aspect as well,” she said.
Of the 104 full-time equivalent positions added, approximately 50 are required to accommodate the expanded busing that will come in next year now that the province has axed the rule that excluded students who live less than 1.6 kilometres from a school from taking the school bus.
Jerry Earle, president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Public and Private Employees (NAPE), was on hand for the funding reannouncement at the Confederation Building and said the challenges student assistants face are dynamic and he had been hearing for a long time they did not feel listened to. He said in the last year they’ve had multiple meetings with department officials and this funding for more students assistants can help students with exceptionalities transition into schools better.
“Students themselves are saying they've been heard, and they appreciate it,” Earle said. “That's not to say there isn’t still some work to do and we will continue to do that collaborative approach through the working group that we've established in the past year or so that should have been done that before, but it's certainly (worth) doing it right now.”
NOT ENOUGH: NDP LEADER
NDP Leader nd Jim Dinn said the announcement, which will see 125 additional hours daily for student assistants in this school year, simply isn’t enough.
“As one principal said to me, ‘Do the math, Jim, it's a joke, 125 hours over 255 schools,’” he said. “Three million sounds like an enormous amount of money and I'll never say that these resources are not welcome. But if you listen to what the minister also said, half the hours, I guess 500 hours or so, are going to be basically for supervising busing, not in the classroom itself. So, is it as good as it could be? No, we can do better.”
Dinn said it's great to have extra staff in the classroom, but if a teacher has a class approaching 30 students and if they have a student with severe needs, those student assistants are going to be assigned to those with the greatest needs.
“You still have a problem, you still have a huge deficit in the classroom,” he said. “So, you need to reduce class size and look at the composition. I haven't heard anything on that. So, put the resources in, but make sure the resources are actually going into the classroom.
Dinn said they’ll wait and see how this change works out, but to address the issues on class composition and class size “they're going to have to do more.”
Progressive Conservative education critic Paul Dinn also criticized the increased funding, saying that while it’s positive, it doesn’t go far enough.
“There's been lots of changes in the school system. We hear government bragging about the increased enrolment, but yet we hear of increased violence and increased complexities within the classroom,” he said. “The minister herself used the word stabilize a number of times, so what comes to mind is something that's in critical condition and you try and stabilize it before you improve it. And I think that's what's happening here. It's a positive any time you put money into something, but it's obviously not going far enough.”
He said a lot of the increased resources announced will go toward dealing with the increased number of students using busing and won’t have as much of an impact in dealing with issues in classrooms.
“You still have a huge deficit in the classroom. So, you need to reduce class size and look at the composition. … Put the resources in, but make sure the resources are actually going into the classroom.” NDP Leader Jim Dinn