The shortage of staff affecting schools is forcing teachers in Estrie, who are already exhausted, to do substitute work in other classes.
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This phenomenon, which mainly affected the greater Montreal area before the pandemic, is increasingly present in schools in Estrie.
For the past three years, school administrators have increasingly called on “emergency replacement”.
Its recourse has become almost systematic when a teacher has to be absent and there is no substitute to replace him.
Better known as compulsory help, other teachers take turns to take over during periods when they are not teaching.
Although they are paid for these overtime hours, their workload is increased because these periods are usually used to perform other equally important tasks, such as correcting work and preparing lessons.
In the region, it is the Val-des-Cerfs school service center that recorded the highest increase in this regard.
In 2019-2020, 672 emergency replacement hours were needed to meet the needs. This number increased to 1050 hours in 2020-2021 to reach 3482 hours in 2021-2022; a jump of 500% in just a few years.
At the Sherbrooke Region school service center, the increase is less spectacular.
In 2020-2021, teachers were called upon to replace a colleague on short notice for the equivalent of 1,062 periods, compared to 1,567 in 2021-2022, an increase of approximately 50%.
According to the unions, recourse to emergency replacement should only be considered to make up for a real lack of substitutes, but it seems that this measure has become the norm.
This shortage of substitutes forces teachers to do more, which makes them more exhausted and pushes some of them to leave, thus exacerbating the shortage of staff.