A month after Alberta teachers were forced back to work, frustrations and concerns still linger in and out of the classroom.
On Nov. 7, the governing UCP promised $300 million to hire 1,500 educational assistants and 3,000 teachers.
But some teachers wonder if that’s enough.
Adam Ayer, a teacher at George McDougall High School in Airdrie, fears the government’s commitment won’t meet minimum requirements.
He says that the additional teachers the UCP government is offering will not address the growing student population in Alberta, as more families move to the growing prairie province.
“They’re advertising a band-aid on a gaping wound, as if it’s a good thing,” Ayer said.
Ayer stresses that one of the major issues plaguing schools across the province is high class sizes, which can reach 50 students per class.
An unsure future
Ayer thinks a lack of incentives is preventing the recruitment of more Alberta teachers.
“We do need to have competitive wages for teachers because, frankly speaking, like even for my wife and I’m like, ‘Why would we work in a province where the stress level impacts our family as much as it does?’” he said. “With the cost of living that we have, financial stability isn’t where it needs to be. So we do need to have competitive salaries because this is a job market where better opportunities exist elsewhere.”
Ayer also believes that despite the province’s pledge to hire more teachers, it’s pointless if worker retention remains where it is.
“How do we know they’re not going to burn out? Because the burnout rate for teachers in the first five years of their career is 50 per cent. Five zero. So you train people up and they spend, what, five, six years in school, and then you don’t know if they’re going to make it past five years on the job,” says Ayer.
As for the strike itself, Ayer remains unsure of what’s to come from the three-week-long labour-management dispute.
“If I had settled for the money and the half-measures in the contract the government proposed without taking the chance to try and improve the system, I don’t think I could have lived with myself,” Ayer said.
A student perspective
For students across the province, the length of this strike may cause panic, as it lasted nearly a month and led the province to cancel all provincial standardized testing, including diploma exams for grade 12 students.
Cameron Seabrook, a grade 12 student at Bert Church High School in Airdrie, likened the 20 days of the strike to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was like a mixture of stress and boredom. Where I was trying to teach myself like my math course and trying to do some schoolwork that I knew we’d have to be rushing through whenever we returned because we had no clue when that was going to be,” said Seabrook.
Ayer says he feels bad for students whose futures are caught between the teachers and the provincial government.
“’The passive level of guilt that I’m having to manage each day as a result of this is substantial. I think going for the relative stability of just having a pay increase and a bunch of half measures would have been given, and I don’t know if I could have lived with myself. It was probably the most intense moral quandary I’ve had as an adult,” Ayer said.