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Petition
Presented June 4, 2008
Government’s new approach to allocating teaching
resources within the Province
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MS JONES: Thank
you, Mr. Speaker.
I rise today to present a
petition on behalf of the parents in the Labrador
Straits area of my district.
Mr. Speaker, it is
regarding the government’s new approach to allocating
teaching resources within the Province and how that is
impacting upon small schools, especially those in rural
communities. Now this is not the only region of the
Province in which I have introduced petitions like this
in the House of Assembly but there are a lot of small
schools around the Province that are in rural-based
areas that have seen the transfer out of teaching units
under this current formula. Mr. Speaker, in many cases
we are going to see not just multi-grading of classes
and children but multi-multi-grading; cases, Mr.
Speaker, where you will have three, four and five grades
all within the one classroom with one teacher.
It is unrealistic to
expect that in today’s society any teacher is going to
want to be teaching four to five grades in one classroom
and moving to remote areas of the Province to do so. I
think in changing this formula and putting additional
workload on these teachers not only are you sacrificing
the quality of education that the students are getting
but you are also, Mr. Speaker, running some high risk in
terms of further recruitment problems down the road in
trying to attract teachers to these regions of the
Province.
Mr. Speaker, these
particular parents are petitioning the Minister of
Education and the government to reinstate teaching units
in small rural schools and review the guidelines to find
a solution that they can reorganize the unique needs of
students in small rural schools.
I think it is a very
legitimate request and although the minister says that
they are not overall reducing teachers in the Province,
what they are doing is they are transferring teachers
out of small schools into larger schools in order to
meet their own criteria that they have implemented on
cap sizes within classrooms and it is not sitting well
in a lot of the rural areas where you have small
schools.
Mr. Speaker, I asked the
minister to table for us, in the House, the breakdown of
the teacher allocations in the various schools around
the Province, but what we got was an allocation on a
district by district basis, and that was not the
information that we had requested.
Hopefully they will give
some consideration to the people who petition the House
on matters like this. |
