Teachers protest budget cuts
Posted May 7, 2011 12:03 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Calgary teachers say they won’t stand for budget cuts by the province.
They plan to protest at Eau Claire market Saturday afternoon, after a recent announcement by the Calgary Board of Education that it’s looking to cut 374 jobs.
The board has said a provincial funding increase of nearly $24-million won’t even cover a ‘cost-of-living’ increase for staff.
Jenny Regal, president of the Alberta Teachers Association Local 38 says the funding cuts will force students into larger classes, where they won’t be able to get all the attention they need.
“They’re not going to have as frequent access to their teacher one-on-one, when they don’t understand what’s going on or when they just need a question to clarify answers,” she says.
Regal adds that this will cause inequities in the classroom. “Inequities that I will say my teacher colleagues will do everything within their power to address, but when there’s X number of kids in your classroom, and only so many minutes in a day, you’re not going to be able to reach out and spend time with each of them,” she says. “That’s going to compromise students’ learning.”
She says the looming layoffs have staff on edge.
“They’re all wondering: ‘where am I going to work next year?’ They’re wondering about if they’re ever going to get back to have their own classroom,” she says. “They went through university for a reason. They want to come back, they just don’t know if it’s going to happen.”
Regal says funding has been chipped away for years but, it’s been really dramatic this year and provincial officials don’t understand the real affects those budget cuts have.
“I think they look at balance sheets and they see numbers and they think there’s enough money out there,” she says. “I don’t believe that they fully understand the intricacies of the dynamics in any given classroom, in any given school and appreciate that working from numbers alone won’t solve a problem.”
It’s not only the province that’s coming under fire, the CBE has also been criticized for spending $285-million this year on a brand new headquarters building.
Regal says they’ll fight the proposed budget cuts every step of the way.
