The Burnaby school district plans to hold off as long as possible before canceling 400 summer school classes for 7,500 students next month.
“We’re delaying any decision until the summer program is clearly no longer viable,” Burnaby board of education chair Baljinder Narang told the NOW. “We’re kind of between a rock and a hard place. We don’t know how to maneuver on this one. The government has lifted its partial lockout for teachers, but we have no decision in terms of how the teachers are going to view this.”
As it stands now, the 390 teachers tentatively hired for the summer session are on a full-scale strike that will wipe out classes unless the B.C. Teachers’ Federation announces a plan that would allow them to go ahead.
But Burnaby Teachers’ Association president and BCTF executive member-at-large-elect James Sanyshyn said the union is busy focusing on Plan A – hammering out a collective agreement.
“We don’t have a position officially on summer school that says, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do at this time,’ because we’re madly trying to work on a collective agreement in time to allow for summer sessions to happen,” he said.
The teachers’ federation could still come up with a plan for summer school in the next few days, he said, but it will be up to the board whether its summer program can still go ahead at that time.
“The board may take its decision before we have a formal decision and that’s their business,” he said.
Classes are scheduled to begin July 2 for secondary students and July 8 for elementary students.
The district told parents in a letter last week it would announce its final decision about summer school a week before start up, but Narang said it could consider pushing that deadline back for secondary classes if there was movement at the bargaining table.
“The only one that we may be able to delay by a week would be the secondary, not the elementary,” she said.
Parents, meanwhile, are in limbo, putting on hold plans for holidays, child care and their older kids’ summer jobs.
“Parents in general just feel stuck in the middle and they’re just waiting,” Burnaby district parent advisory chair Jen Mezei said.
Sanyshyn said he sympathizes, but he blamed the provincial government for the lack of progress at the bargaining table.
“We understand that there are people who caught in the middle of a labour-relations dispute and that’s really unfortunate,” he said, "but we’ve modified our proposal quite dramatically. The salary proposal we tabled is within one per cent of what government had been offering, and yet there’s no desire to bargain fairly.”
The Ministry of Education expressed the opposite view in a press release Thursday, saying the teachers’ new wage and benefit demands alone were twice what other unions have settled for.
“We are now further away from an agreement than we were a week ago,” Education Minister Peter Fassbender said in the press release. “We want to give teachers a raise but the BCTF leadership is making that virtually impossible.”
