Jay Aspin, the chair of the Near North District School Board, says the board is on the side of the students.
Aspin was reacting to a decision by the board’s high school teachers to strike if no collective agreement is possible with the board.
The support for a strike was 97 percent.
Aspin had very little to say about the strong support from teachers to withdraw services.
Rather he remained focused on keeping the students at the forefront.
“We’d like to see the students in the class and that’s our position,” he said.
Aspin said the local board is a bystander on where contract talks currently stand and emphasized this was a negotiating matter between the provincial government and the teachers’ provincial union.
Glen Hodgson, the President of District 4 of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, said concerns just didn’t exist at the provincial level.
Hodgson said there were also local concerns including the incident earlier this year when the board issued numerous layoff notices to its high school teachers only to rescind many of those notices shortly before the school year ended.
Hodgson said locally the union wanted to clarify job security and create contract language that ensures transparency where staffing issues are involved.
He said the goal was to create a process that protects the teachers and families and prevents a repeat of the massive layoff notices that went out last spring which resulted in turmoil.
In response, Aspin said, “the situation that happened in the spring has been resolved and we’re moving on.”
“We just want to see the students in the schools,” Aspin added.
Aspin also responded to Hodgson’s comments about the Ford government eliminating more than 10,000 teaching positions and increasing the average class sizes.
On class sizes, Aspin says the Ministry of Education is responsible for setting those parameters and local school boards work within those parameters.
Aspin says declining enrolment across Ontario is the reason why the province needs fewer teachers.
“The pattern of employment mirrors declining enrolment and that’s (being) responsible to the public,” he said.
“And it’s no different here.”
Aspin says the strike votes that the high school teachers are taking across various boards are provincially-driven.
“We are responding to that the best we can,” he said.
“We’d like to keep the students in the class. That’s our priority. We’re squarely on the side of the students.”