The Upper Grand District School Board has issued layoff notices to 54 elementary school teachers.
The layoffs, which cover 40.2 full time-equivalent jobs in Kindergarten to Grade 8, become effective in September and do not interrupt positions in the current school year.
Both the school board and the union representing the teachers are hopeful that the teachers affected will be hired back once funding models from the provincial government become clearer.
“Their future right now is bleak in September, but we’re hoping that will change,” said Gundi Barbour, president of the local Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) bargaining unit.
“We had an inkling that there would be some challenges because there’s a great deal of uncertainty,” Barbour said, pointing to recent provincial funding cuts and uncertainty about the upcoming provincial budget that will be delivered April 11..
“There’s great uncertainty about what the budget is going to bring when it’s announced,” Barbour said.
Barbour said there is also little increase in student enrolment across the board for next year that could transfer into fewer teachers.
“Unfortunately, we are in a position where we had to issue lay-off notices to 54 of our teachers. It is our hope that we will be able to recall some, if not all, of these teachers,” said Heather Loney, Communications and Community Engagement Officer with the UGDSB.
The layoff notices were issued now because of timelines contained in the collective bargaining agreements with the union.
“We've had to do this a number of times in the past, most recently in 2015, and in the past we have successfully recalled everyone,” Loney said via email.
“We do know, however, that we will be working with less provincial funding, but we don't know the full impact of that yet. We are expecting to receive full funding details from the government at the end of April.”
Loney said the layoffs are due to a variety of things including a loss in provincial revenue, provincial changes to autism funding that resulted in the loss of some programs, Local Priority Funding that expires at the end of August and in our board supported English as a second language and special education programs.
Barbour said the last layoff was 2015 and she believes that involved 22 or 24 teachers.
But she said school boards just don’t know what programs they are going to be able to afford in September until the provincial budget comes down. Unfortunately layoff notices have to be given before that is known.
