Local CUPE president standing with Sask. teachers on class sizes

With Saskatchewan teachers and the province slated to go back to the bargaining table Monday, the discussion around classroom size and complexity appears to once again be ramping up.

Since the start of negotiations, teachers have drawn a line in the sand, saying they want the large class sizes addressed before they sign a new deal.

Dene Nicholson, a library tech in the Saskatoon Public Schools system and the president of CUPE Local 8443, is vocal about the issue.

“We’ve gotten to the point where all these cuts cumulatively have now started to affect what happens in the classroom,” Nicholson said on The Evan Bray Show on Thursday.

“We have some education assistants who are visiting five to six classrooms a day because they’re stretched. We just don’t have the time anymore because the classrooms are so large and there’s so many different needs in those classrooms.”

Nicholson suggests that putting issues like class size and complexity in their contract could help resolve the issues they’re facing right now in Saskatchewan schools.

“The teachers’ working conditions are the students’ learning conditions. When you’ve got a classroom that has 30-plus students in it, the desks in that room make it hard for anybody to move around,” she explained.

“If you have a student in crisis and you have an obstacle course to get to the door or you need to evacuate for whatever reason, it’s just not a safe place to be.”

Nicholson added classes of 30-plus students are often expanded as the year goes on with new students moving to town.

“The classroom size needs to be dealt with,” she said. “They can’t the start the year at 30-plus students because all throughout the year, you get transfers in. So your classroom might start at 30 in September, but then by June you have 40 kids in that classroom and it just doesn’t work.

“There’s got to be supports for those kids who need them. If we don’t have the support from the government, then the board can’t supply those supports that are needed.”

Right now, Nicholson says the funding they need isn’t coming from the provincial government and it’s something that needs to be addressed.