Durham Teachers frustrated as Province-wide Strike Intentions are increasingly misunderstood
Aleah Balas | February 21, 2020
Teachers across Ontario took to the sidewalks today to strike against the Ontario Government’s cuts to education, including a variety of protest locations across Durham Region. In Brooklin, stationed at Winchester Public School, were over 50 protesters including picket captain Tamara Brown.
Brown expressed her disappointment in the way that Ontarians are consuming news and information from the Ford Government at face value.
“We’ve already lost out on the 2% we were fighting for. We are here because we support the needs of our students, not for ourselves,” Brown said.
According to government statistics, the province-wide strike has left 2 million students out of school for the day. When contacted about the repercussions of this, the spokesperson of Ontario Minister of Education, Stephen Lecce, declined to comment.
“While union leaders are continuing to organize further disruption, our government remains focused on getting deals that ensure students are learning each and every day,” Lecce said in a formal statement on Thursday evening.
In 2019, the provincial government ordered school boards to increase class sizes. In high schools, the class sized will move from an average of 22 to 28 over the course of four years and in elementary school it will move from 23 to 24 on average over the same four year period.
Brown noted that these averages range across the entire province though, meaning that one classroom could be significantly higher and others much lower so long as the average remains intact. Last year, while teaching fourth grade in a portable at Sir Samuel Steele Public School in Whitby, Brown had 32 students in her class.
“With that many bodies in a small space, and that young, you’re dealing with a raised safety concern, just by bumping into each other,” she said of the situation. As class sizes grow, many teachers are being injured on the job.
“When you’ve created these classrooms where teachers are getting injured and now you’re coming after our health care benefits, why?” Brown noted that many teachers have been injured from the overcrowded classrooms and lack of support due to the cuts.
“It is just so frustrating. We want to be in the classroom where we should be,” said Mattea Van Asten, a kindergarten teacher who works alongside Brown at Sir Samuel Steele Public School. Van Asten noted that she has been moved from teaching higher grades to having to teach kindergarten because of the class size increase they don’t need as many teachers.
“I don’t think people understand the situation and just see their kids out of school for the day as an inconvenience,” added Van Asten.
In September 2019, the Federal Accountability Officer Peter Weltman found that public schools in Ontario will lose approximately 10,000 teachers in the next five years in direct correlation with the class size increase.
Each school in Durham Region was assigned a strike location where teachers protest in three hour shifts. Amidst the commotion, those driving by could honk to show their support.
Among the concerns that teachers have for their students, online learning is a prominent one. In 2019, the Ford Government proposed a plan to make “e-learning” mandatory in order for students to graduate high school. At first the plan was for students to complete four courses, but it has since been reduced to two.
“[E-learning] is much harder for people to be successful because it uses a different part of the memory, so if you have any short-term memory issues, you’re not going to be as successful as other students,” Brown said. She has done an extensive amount of research on the topic in the midst of these new propositions.
“I realized when I was doing the research, it’s a different skillset to do an online course and that’s what they’re trying to push all of these kids into. You’re forcing students into these situations, which is really unfair,” she said.
Brown and her counterparts are remaining positive about the situation and hoping their efforts will be able to save the quality of educations that students in Ontario deserve.
