Dear Editor:
Re: Will teacher take a pay cut to pay for increased costs?, Letters to the editor, Burnaby NOW, Feb. 14.
Mr. Melnyk rather misses the point when he asks if teachers will take a pay cut to cover the increased costs of the recent Supreme Court decision restoring class size and composition provisions to their contracts. Teachers already took that pay cut in return for class size and composition limits negotiated back in the 1990s. That is why teachers were so angry when then-education minister Christy Clark introduced (with "great pleasure," she said) legislation that arbitrarily and illegally stripped those provisions from their contracts.
Mr. Melnyk should also know that B.C. teachers' salaries are already very near the bottom compared to other provinces, that the B.C. government is well below the national average in spending per pupil, and that B.C. has among the worst students-to-educator ratios in Canada.
Successive Liberal governments have been balancing their books by underfunding education (among other things) while handing out tax breaks that benefit mainly corporations and the wealthy. Surely our students and teachers deserve better.
Lee Rachar, Burnaby
