As the weather turns warmer many students are no doubt turning their thoughts to summer holidays, which probably seem still a long way off at this point. Hopefully, Ontario elementary students won’t find themselves out of school prematurely due to the current standoff between teachers and the province.
At this point, the labour unrest has led to a work-to-rule campaign with teachers declining to perform non-mandatory functions such as providing comments on report cards or administering provincial standardized testing. Extra-curricular activities, field trips, and help for students outside class time continues, which means students themselves will not likely even be noticing the job action.
However, the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario has made it clear the pressure will be increased if the school year continues without a deal in place, so the present situation should be taken as little more than notice of pending disruption.
As soon as the word “strike” begins to occur in the same conversation as “teacher” many people become indignant, assuming the issues revolve around wages and benefits, areas in which Ontario teachers are well taken care of.
It should be remembered the issues in the current negotiations involve control of how allocated preparation time is spent and what teachers see as an excessive number of ministry initiatives with which to deal. While these matters do affect teacher workload, they can also legitimately be considered quality of education issues, meaning the dispute is at least ostensibly about what’s good for the students.
Even so, a lengthy interruption in education during the stretch run of the school year can’t be sold as beneficial to students, so both government and union members should be prepared for negative reaction if it comes to that.
Part of the frustration of many is tied to the regularity with which these work interruptions seem to occur.
Meanwhile, in some jurisdictions, parents are the ones interrupting their own children’s education by pulling them from school in a protest over the province’s planned changes to the health and physical education curriculum, better known among its opponents as “sex ed.” It’s unclear if these parents realize they could, as the government has often stated, simply have their children opt out of the lessons, but if so, their attempts to halt the implementation of the curriculum amount to an effort to impose their own views on the majority of parents who agree the existing curriculum was outdated (a 2013 Environics survey indicated roughly nine in 10 parents of elementary school children agreed the curriculum needed updating and that sexual health should be part of health education).
This dispute too, is one that would be better handled by less extreme measures than withholding a child’s education.
