The Upper Grand District School Board is looking at growing its own teachers as it addresses the issue of teacher shortages.
That includes the growing issue all school boards are facing in finding enough qualified French language teachers.
An estimated 4,900 people in the education sector in Ontario are retiring annually and teachers’ colleges are handing out around 5,000 new teachers’ licences a year, said the UGDSB.
Demand for teachers, and in particular French immersion and core French teachers, is outgrowing supply.
“Staffing is a constraint when we start to think about growing the program,” says UGDSB spokesperson Heather Loney about French immersion, adding that staffing is not the lone constraint, but a significant one.
“The bottom line is that there are not enough qualified teachers to hire from and every board is sharing from the same small pool of teachers.”
There are currently 5,736 students enrolled in French immersion in the UGDSB, 5,002 in elementary school and 734 in high school.
In the past five years French immersion numbers at the elementary level has jumped 22 per cent.
The board has 369 French teachers for both its immersion and core French classes.
The UGDSB does what all school boards do: attending job fairs, holding interviews on the spot, travelling as far away as Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to try and find French teachers.
But a new initiative in development will see the board look within its own walls to find new teachers in general.
One of the more innovative things being considered is “home grown” teachers.
“We do have some other things that we are working on, that we’re just beginning to investigate, and one thing is to to try and grow our own teachers, so to speak,” said Vicky Crandall, manager of elementary staffing and recruitment with the UGDSB.
“When we’re looking at students and their career pathways we’re now going to investigate from Grade 7 on up how we could nurture and support students who maybe would have those qualities of a good teacher and have that interest in following that pathway,” Crandall said.
The reason is simple: teachers tend to want to work in their hometowns.
“What we do find is a lot of our teachers who end up in our roster and in our permanent positions is that this is their home area ... They want to be where their family and friends are and that’s perfectly understandable.
“If we could sort of grow our own, so to speak, we may have more success,” Crandall said.
Finding qualified French teachers is becoming a huge issue and one that is not unique to the UGDSB or Ontario.
A report released last week by the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages detailed just how difficult it is for school boards to find French as a second language (FSL) teachers, with some boards hiring people who speak French only slightly better than the students they’re teaching, said the report.
“Several school boards admitted to keeping language requirements low for fear of not being able to fill positions. Some felt that, in light of the lack of candidates, it was necessary to settle for teachers with only a slightly higher level of French than their students,” the report said.
Crandall said that hasn’t been the case at the UGDSB.
“We have not been doing that to the extent that is implying,” she said. “Do we have teachers in classrooms that don’t have FSL qualifications? We do, but in those cases they actually have strong enough French language skills to be there.”
Having FSL qualification and having French language skills are not necessarily the same thing.
Some people with strong French language skills might not have the FSL qualification, which is an additional qualification available to teaches.
Loney said that the problem is bad enough at the elementary level but becomes a double whammy at the high school level, because now not only do they have to be proficient in French, they also have to be qualified in specific subject matter.
“You have quite a bit of choice,” Crandall said of French-qualified teachers who are entering the job market. “That candidate can pick and choose where they want to go.”
