JOSHUA ALLAN
The 1019 Report
The Lester B. Pearson School Board is not immune to the province-wide teacher shortage and is actively looking to fill vacant staff roles as the new school year gets under way.
There continues to be “some teacher staffing shortages across the (board’s) network,” explained Darren Becker, the Pearson board’s director of communications, in a written statement. “But the school board is continuing its efforts to fill the spots as soon as possible. And in the interim, we are not anticipating any impacts on the quality of education we offer our students.”
Becker declined to offer any further details or provide figures on how many teaching positions remain to be filled.
Last month, Quebec Education Minister Bernard Drainville said that the province was short 5,700 teachers as the new school year approached.
The Pearson board, which operates nine elementary schools and two high school campuses in Vaudreuil-Soulanges along with 19 English-language elementary and six high schools in the West Island, has admitted to hiring non-legally qualified teachers to fill vacancies. It is a practice the board had been following for years, Becker said, adding that all personnel have training in related fields.
However, this practice often leaves parents scrambling to ensure that their children are learning properly, said Katherine Korakakis, president of the English Parents’ Committee Association of Quebec.
“There’s a lot of repercussions when you don’t have teachers in the classrooms that are qualified,” Korakakis said. “When you have a teacher in a classroom that doesn’t know the subject matter, then children aren’t learning the subject matter. That affects their motivation, but it also affects exams at the end of the year.”
Korakakis used her personal experience as a parent when it comes to non-legally qualified teachers in school classrooms. She explained that her daughter, who attends a school managed by the English Montreal School Board, now has a French teacher who does not speak French.
“Tell me how this serves my child,” she said. “Tell me how this is going to help me do everything in my power to help keep my daughter here and not lose her to other Canadian provinces or to the United States.”
Korakakis said that the practice of hiring non-legally qualified teachers is partly to blame for the jump in the number of students signing up for summer school across the province.
“It does a disservice,” she added, “and the victims are children.”
In July, media reports claimed the number of summer school registrations had hit an all-time high. Although there were no figures for the summer school registrations for the Pearson board, the reports claimed the number of students seeking help in the summer jumped 48 per cent in the French-language Montreal School Service Centre and 114 in the St. Hyacinthe School Service Centre.