Q. When schools let out in June, some districts said they didn’t have adequate funding to hire the teachers needed to implement the restored contracts. What has been done to address this?
A. We have worked out arrangements where we now have a common understanding of what the language means in terms of a monetary commitment. There were a couple of districts that were reluctant to hire because they had not had confirmation during the time we had the Liberal government and then no government for a period of time.
I can’t make a funding announcement today, but I can tell you that additional money will be included in the budget we table in September. That budget has enhancements in it that will fully fund the memorandum of agreement and that has made a commitment on new enrolment, which was a grey area under the previous government.
Q. So there will definitely be new money for education in this budget?
A. Yes. There will be the resources to properly fund all the commitments, whether they’re by court order or because it’s the right thing to do. We take the Supreme Court decision very seriously and we also see it as a great opportunity to fund some of the priorities we have around more one-on-one time for kids and for making classes smaller in the early grades.
Q. Some districts are struggling to hire enough teachers. What will happen if they can’t get people in place for September?
A. We are hoping districts will have the teaching staff they need. Some of them are going to be depleting their teacher on call list to do that. It’s really uneven out there. Some districts have expressed a high degree of confidence that they have met their hiring requirements and that what has been quite a Herculean task has been made manageable, but there are other districts that are struggling to meet that.
Q. What happens if they can’t get teachers in place?
A. Where hiring cannot happen, there is a process where a teacher and the teachers’ association can reach an agreement with the school board to apply a remedy. They will find local solutions that work for the student and the teacher.
Q. Will the remedies all be funded?
A. Yes. We realize there is a funding risk attached to grievances and remedies that need to be provided. We think we have arrived at some additional funding that will cover those contingencies.
Q. Were any childcare centres in B.C. displaced by the new smaller class sizes?
A. Yes, there are four districts reporting space pressures on childcare facilities based in their schools – Vancouver, Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows, Coquitlam and Greater Victoria. The restored contract requires 550 more classrooms across the province and perhaps up to one-third of those will be in portables. Not all of those are new portables, some will be renovated.
School districts are aware of how valuable childcare centres are, but where they face extreme space pressures, they have had to pursue relocation. I think this happened to 14 centres in the entire province.
There are two of the 14 in Maple Ridge- Pitt Meadows that are still looking for space at this time, but they are working with the school district or they may have been sold or amalgamated.
Q. The planned $10-a-day childcare program will require many more spaces, correct?
A. We’re going to have to create a whole bunch of new spaces, some maybe on school district property or municipal property. We will look for free land from all levels of government.
When new schools are constructed, we will be looking at neighbourhood learning centres with childcare spaces in them. It makes sense, when you’re building a new school – and there are a number of them that have already been approved – that we make sure where there is a demonstrated need for childcare spaces that (we capitalize on the) opportunity.
Q. How do you like your new role so far?
A. It’s way better than being in opposition, I can tell you that. We get to do a lot more. They left us some crazy messes, there is no doubt about that. I thought I was quite reasonably aware of the broken commitments they made on seismic upgrades, but really the new school construction and the poor facility asset conditions in so many districts are going to require a lot more of my attention on the capital side.
Obviously, any minister of education wants to keep their attention on student outcomes and how students are doing and sharing the successes of districts that are doing innovative things. But overcrowded schools are really up close and personal. I visited Surrey last Friday and saw a couple of schools I hadn’t seen before. It’s hard to catch up when very little has been done over a 15-year period. We can do it, if everybody is going to be prepared to move a lot quicker.
Q. So I guess we can expect lots of capital funding announcements?
A. Yes, you can. A big part of it is just the ministry following through. They’ve often approved things and then pulled them back. They’ve underspent their capital budgets, meagre as they were compared to previous decades, in some cases by 30 to 40 per cent per year. As lots of experienced people who have worked in the civil service or at the political level have told me, it’s not so much the budget, but getting things out the door. So that’s got a lot of my attention.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Tracy Sherlock writes about education and social issues. She can be reached at tracy.sherlock@gmail.com.
