Move on key school policies

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It is good news that teachers have accepted the government’s offer for a new collective agreement – thus removing the possibility of a labour disruption.

More than 86 per cent of the membership voted in favour. And no wonder: Employees will see a 15 per cent pay bump by 2025.

That’s a lot of money in an already-stretched education system. It’ll rightly upset workers in other sectors who’ve seen little or no relief on the wage front, often owing to pressures facing their employers.

But it’s also hard to see how the province could have been stingy this time. The period since the contract expired has seen the highest inflation in a generation. And it’s well documented that teachers had to step up during the coronavirus pandemic, which was still ongoing for about half the period the teachers haven’t had a contract.

Still, we are looking forward to learning more details. Right now, the wage bump is all we know, and both sides are being tight-lipped at this point. But there are many education policy issues that need to be addressed.

First, there is the recent controversy over gender-identity policy. Then there is the future of inclusion in schools – or more specifically the interpretation of inclusion moving forward. Class size and composition are a related problem.

And then there are snow days – a piece of the school’s education policy that has gone unaddressed for years.

It is clearly broken. The Department of Education managed to transition students to remote learning for long stretches of time during the pandemic. Surely we can do the same for one-off instances in which buses are unable to take students to school.

We hope the province has pushed an agenda on these points with the teachers. A wage bump of this size is significant; getting movement on key policies should have been sought in return.