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Government files stay on court ruling

Yule reviews implications for school district

Lawyers for the BC government warned of massive disruptions to school districts across the province last week if a court ruling, which reversed decade-old changes to the teachers’ collective agreement, was allowed to stand.

Jay Yule, School District 47 superintendent of schools, is taking a wait-and-see approach and assured Powell River’s Board of Education that reverting back to the old contract language was not going to have large financial repercussions.

The BC government is in the process of appealing a BC Supreme Court decision from last month which ruled that legislation, which removed issues such as class size and composition from the teachers’ collective agreement, was unconstitutional. The court also ruled that the government tried to push the teachers into a full-scale strike and awarded $2 million to the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF).

The government’s lawyer, Karen Horsman, requested the BC Court of Appeal on Friday, February 14, put the ruling on hold while the court hears the appeal. She said that if the ruling is not put on hold, school boards would immediately have to start making changes to plans for the 2014-2015 school year. Much of that planning and budgeting is already well underway.

The BCTF estimates that the shortfall in education over the past decade runs at about 3,500 positions and $350 million annually. The government spends $5.4 billion per year on eduction.

BCTF lawyer John Rogers said that the union is not asking for the ruling to be put in place right away and expects the class size and composition changes to take effect in September 2014.

Yule spoke at February’s board of education meeting about the court’s decision and its implication on the school district.

“I think we’re just waiting right now to see what the outcome will be, and we have done some work around what we think the impact will be if we revert to our old contract language,” said Yule. He explained to the board that with a little extra funding they would be able to adhere to the class size provisions with small adjustments. He said that there would be some need to increase the number of district teacher librarians.

Class composition, the number of students with special needs in each class—a slightly more complex issue—could be handled through ongoing consultations with the local teachers’ union about how best the teacher and class could be supported. In the past the union and the board worked together to find a solution with the resources that were available.

Yule explained that many districts filed worst-case scenario plans that created many new classes out of the need to limit two students with special needs per class.

“No district could afford that including ours, but that has not been our history in how we manage the contract,” he said. The position the district took in 2002, when the language around class composition came in and would continue to have today, was that limiting to two students with special needs was discriminatory, he added.

Powell River and District Teachers’ Association president Cathy Fisher applauded Yule’s “reality-based” approach to the decision’s implications for the district.