More than 51,000 teachers in Alberta will attack as of October 6 if an agreement is not reached before then.
It occurs after months of stagnant negotiations with the province, Jason Schilling, president of the Alberta Teachers Association, said Wednesday.
October 6 is a day before the 120 -day strike voting validity expires.
“Students are being of exchange and our teachers are being pushed on the edge. Without bold, immediate and sustained intervention of the government, the situation will deteriorate even more,” said Schilling.
“The moment of half of the measures and political deflection have ended. Our children deserve something better and also the people who teach them.”
Some together, including Edmonton’s public schools, have begun to communicate with parents.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, Alberta Minister of Finance, Nate Horner, said the decision has launched “a shadow of uncertainty and doubt during the beginning of the school year.”
“I am disappointed that the ATA is using the possible interruption of the school year, since the leverage in its search for additional compensation. Announcing a strike that begins on October 6 before the parties have resumed the negotiations only serves to increase stress between students and alberta families,” he reads.
At an unrelated press conference, Prime Minister Danielle Smith echoed that disappointment, since he thought the two parties were making “great progress.”
Schilling said he doesn’t see it that way.
“We have teachers who are dealing with the greatest classes they have dealt with in their lives,” he said.
“We have students who are learning in libraries, corridors and boots rooms in this province. And therefore, to say that we are progressing … I don’t understand where that comes from.”
Smith said the government has the ability to give a 12 percent salary increase in the course of four years. More than that would leave the province brief money, something Smith says he is not willing to do.
“Something has to give here,” he said Wednesday.
“If they simply return and say: ‘Give us more money’, that will not address the fundamental problems we hear from teachers.”
Smith said that he understands that problems must be fundamentally about the size and complexity of the classroom.
“That is resolved by having more teachers in the classroom and more educational assistants in the classroom,” said Smith.
“The last thing they put on the table to hire 1,000 teachers per year for the next three years, we agreed.”
According Provincial StatisticsThere were 91,000 more Alberta students enrolled in K-12 classes in September 2024 compared to four years before, which led the student population to 825,817.
Schilling said that adding these teachers is a beginning, “but does not begin to meet the needs created by years of negligence and growth of record registration.”
“The government is fine within its financial capacity to meet the needs of teachers and have given themselves a fiscal scene,” said Schilling.
Smith said that she and her government expect to avoid a strike and are prepared to try to advance in classroom conditions and get more personnel in the classroom.
How do we get here?
A contract dispute that involved the teachers that this happened for the last time in 2002, when approximately 20,000 Alberta teachers smell on strike because they were frustrated with large classes, a dull salary and the effect on the retention of teachers, said Larry Booi, the former president of ATE who directed the educators in that strike, in an interview at the end of last month.
With the aim of going to spending to balance the budget, the conservative government united by former Prime Minister Jason Kenney changed the school financing formula and the structure of subsidies from 2020.
Five years of budget followed where the K-12 education funds of the province did not maintain the rhythm of additional inflation costs and increasing registration.
Although the Government has indicated the increases in the annual educational budget, the operational financing is almost $ 9.9 billion this year, it is a government policy that the increases in expenses must be lower than the cumulative effects of inflation and population growth.
He has left Alberta students among the least financed in the country.
