The recent decision of the Center de services scolaire du Pays-des-Bleuets to reorganize its services in order to counter the effects of the labor shortage is surprising.
At the beginning of the school year, the same school organization had a waiting list for parents who wanted their child to attend school daycare. The shortage was hitting hard with 250 places to be found. Another school service center in the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region has decided to offer training to students in grades 5e and 6e year to stay home alone rather than staying in school after school hours.
The situation is criticized since daycare educators have groups whose ratios are exceeded. In addition, special education technicians are exhausted because they are always in a hurry.
The labor shortage is leading to cuts in the services children need. The school community is constantly looking for solutions to solve these problems. We may cut 4-year-old kindergarten classes and ask even more overworked staff, but that will not solve anything and will only displace the problems.
School bodies must come to terms with budgetary rules that lead them to make administrative decisions to balance the books without taking the child’s needs into account.
They offer 12-hour positions to an educator who ends up finding another job that offers more hours elsewhere, when she could continue to provide other services to students. They manage a financial problem with the impacts that we are experiencing.
These decisions sweep away the difficulties elsewhere and the temptation becomes even stronger to cut and stretch the elastic until a point of no return which has now been reached. Students have to make do with basic services and staff working conditions are deteriorating a little more every day. The government has repeated ad nauseam that education is a priority, but this must be followed by concrete actions. It happens too frequently that ministerial directives do not reach the community and that the fear of budget cuts in the next provincial budget comes to upset their forecasts.
School bodies are planning for the next school year and they still do not know if the current budgetary measures will be renewed. The school calendars do not start in January, but in September. The organization of educational services is therefore always at cross purposes, while the other departments consider fiscal years.
The members of our federation constantly talk to us about administrative aberrations that interfere with the services offered to students and that only worsen working conditions. You don’t just have to recruit new people, you have to keep them there.
4-year-old kindergarten classes and school daycare services are necessary; they were created to meet needs that are only growing from year to year. The quality of services to students is affected, whereas they must be maintained and improved. We must avoid finding ourselves faced with an acknowledgment of failure and realizing too late the negative impacts on young people. Everything must be done to ensure that our education system accomplishes its mission.