New money won’t help overcrowded classrooms

MICHAELA RODRIGUE

IQALUIT — The 12 to 14 new teaching positions that the Nunavut government provided for in its budget last month will maintain Nunavut’s current pupil-teacher ratio, but not improve it, Education Minister James Arvaluk told MLAs this week.

“The $1.2 million is for new teachers for the extraordinary growth,” Arvaluk said this week.

“Increased enrollment in school requires increased funding to maintain the pupil teacher ratio,” he said.

But the president of the Federation of Nunavut Teachers, Donna Stephania, is worried that the actual number of teachers in Nunavut’s schools may even drop.

Right now, Nunavut’s regional boards of education have been moving money around to hire a greater number of teachers than the government’s pupil teacher ratio formula actually calls for.

For example, Stephania said that under the current formula, Iqaluit’s population only warrants 48 teachers. But there are actually 60.5 teachers working in Iqaluit.

“Some boards allocated extra teachers from other funds. Will that still happen? Nobody knows,” Stephania said.

Normally, school boards take money allocated for other purposes and use it to increase the number of teaching positions, Stephania said. Stephania wants to know whether that will continue once the boards are dissolved on July 1.

“We need more teachers”

But she also says the government needs to pay for more teachers to drive down the pupil-teacher ratio. “We need more teachers,” Stephania said.

During review of the Department of Education budget by the legislature’s committee of the whole, Iqaluit Centre MLA Hunter Tootoo asked Arvaluk for assurances that all Nunavut communities will at least get the same number of teachers next year, if not more.

“How are you going to base the distribution of these teachers to ensure that Iqaluit is going to be looking at, again, at least 63 teachers next year, and more, if the numbers are warranted based on extraordinary funding?” Tootoo asked.

But Arvaluk said he must wait to receive student enrollment numbers from the Baffin divisional education council before he can make any promises.

“I cannot just comment on one community like Iqaluit whether they have the greatest need right now in comparison to other communities. We will get that from the divisional boards,” Arvaluk said.

Arvaluk later told reporters that communities with decreasing numbers of school-age children may lose teachers.

“There may be some decrease of population of students in some areas. Usually its an increase but sometimes there’s a decrease,” Arvaluk said.

Changes to ratio?

Nunavut uses a sliding scale to assign teachers to classrooms. A community with 101 elementary school students will get five teachers, while 483 students would get 22 teachers.

But that figures includes principals and specialists, which means real classroom sizes are sometimes much higher than the prescribed pupil -teacher ratio.

Tootoo asked Arvaluk if his department does in fact plan to reduce the ratio. Arvaluk said he wants to simplify the ratio “so that it can complement the reality of what is happening in classrooms.”

Right now the department is trying to use a 22 to one ratio but the true figure varies from community to community, he said.

And deputy minister Bob Moody said reducing pupil-teacher ratios “is an expensive item.”

But Tootoo said a reduced pupil-teacher ratio and smaller classrooms must be a long-term strategy of the government and he said once classrooms get to a certain size it’s more like “babysitting.”