Quebec’s public schools still have 2,707 teaching positions to fill, in the middle of back-to-school week. The needs are particularly acute in Montreal, while the entire province is hit by significant needs for support and professional staff.
That number is 1,151 fewer than the 3,858 teaching positions that remained unfilled a week ago, according to the most recent update to the Education Ministry’s dashboard early Wednesday evening. But it’s still higher than the number at this time last year, when 1,810 teaching positions remained unfilled in the province’s public schools.
Province-wide, these 2,707 positions represent 2.8% of the 97,818 teachers needed by the network, a number that has been revised upwards compared to the 95,273 teachers that the ministry estimated it needed in the province’s schools as of last week.
In Montreal, however, this percentage climbs to 4.4%, at a time when 966 full-time and part-time teaching positions remain to be filled.
“It’s not an easy start to the school year, and that’s despite all the recruitment efforts” that have been made by school service centres and school administrations, sighs the president of the Montreal Association of School Administration, Kathleen Legault, in an interview with DutyA situation that she attributes to the rapid growth in the number of students in the metropolis’ schools.
In order to compensate for the lack of teachers in the network, schools are resorting in particular to substitute teachers, underlines M.me Legault. A situation that puts schools in a fragile situation. “When someone is sick in a month or two months, we will have no one on the waiting list” to provide replacements, she warns.
In addition to the shortage of teachers, there is also a shortage of professional staff, a situation which particularly affects students with special needs, notes M.me Legault. The ministry’s dashboard still reported on Wednesday that there were 689 positions still to be filled among professional staff, including 197 psychoeducators, 185 speech therapists and 147 psychologists. This represents 10.7% of all professional staff positions to be filled in the Quebec network. This percentage climbs to 16.3% in Montreal.
The ministry also reports 3,722 support staff positions to be filled in the public school system, including 2,547 daycare educators and 1,175 special education technicians.