April 12, 2007

Renu Kulendran

Director

Provincial Stability Commission

700 Bay St., 17th Floor

Toronto, ON

M5G 1Z6

Dear Renu Kulendran,

On behalf of Ontario’s 5,000 public school leaders, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to provide our views on the work of the Provincial Stability Commission to date. 

Ontario’s public school principals and vice-principals have been grappling with safety and supervision concerns since 2005, when the amount of time teachers were required to supervise students was significantly decreased in elementary public schools.  In our view, these challenges cannot be dealt with until standards are put in place to define appropriate levels of supervision.  To try to deal with supervision concerns before standards are adopted is akin to putting the cart before the horse, because it only allows us to deal with them in a subjective way.

While we acknowledge that the Commission has an important mandate, it is, in effect, a labour relations forum for resolving disputes arising out of the 2005 Collective Agreements.  As such, it is not the appropriate forum for deciding the level of supervision that is needed in schools.

Safety is a public interest issue, not a labour relations one.  Safety and supervision should be addressed in a more public manner.  Standards that will serve schools, students and the public would be more appropriately developed by the government, as opposed to an arms-length body designed to deal with bargaining issues.  We have been asking for the development of standards for over two years now and, in their absence, released our own in February of this year.  Our standards are based on good practice in other jurisdictions and respond directly to practices currently in place in schools across the province that we do not consider to be adequate.

Schools have been dealing with supervision in a vacuum since the Collective Agreements were signed in 2005.  That vacuum needs to be filled.  Until the government develops its own set of standards, the OPC Standards should be used to fill this vacuum, since they were developed by principals, and principals have been given the legislative duty to ensure student safety in their schools.

It is imperative that standards be implemented in schools immediately, for several reasons.  First, schools are already in the process of developing supervision schedules for the 2007/08 school year.  We cannot allow the security of students to be jeopardized for another year.  Schools need standards to which they can refer, and they need them now.

Second, declining enrolment in many boards throughout the province will result in fewer school staff in the coming year.  This will have a negative impact on supervision and safety, as schools struggle to develop schedules when there are fewer adults to which they can assign duty.

Finally, recent poll results of principals from across the province indicate that many schools cannot currently meet our proposed standards, let alone any future reductions.  There has been a deterioration of practice and gaps continue to grow.

What needs to be understood by all parties is that provisions in the Collective Agreement, supervision, safety and funding are all intrinsically linked.  In order to reach the 80-minute target set by the Provincial Framework, funding to boards must be increased or the security of students will be compromised.  If no funding is available, then there must be more flexibility for schools to assign additional supervision duties as required, as was the original intent when the two pre-conditions of safety and cost were included in the Provincial Framework language. 

We’d also like to reiterate our concern around the apparent misunderstanding pertaining to principal sign-off of supervision schedules.  In some boards, it is not the individual principal, but the School Supervision Committee or the board’s Joint Supervision Committee that signs off.  In other boards, principals have been directed to sign off on schedules, despite personal concerns they may have.  And in other boards, principals who signed off on a schedule in the spring of 2006 did not recognize the gaps it would create around student safety until the schedule was implemented.  As such, it is erroneous and misrepresentative to claim that principals believe their schools to be safe, due to the sign- off of a school schedule.

Finally, it is imperative that the PSC consider the question of what constitutes “best practice.”  Determining what is considered safe practice in schools has become quite complicated.  What constitutes the best efforts of a school to reach the 80-minute target?

Principals do not believe – nor do we think parents would support – that schedules should reach the 80-minute target by closing off parts of the playground, closing play structures, having students eat lunch on gymnasium floors, eroding instructional time or eroding the working conditions of other employee groups.  If these short cuts are the only way that a school can reach the 80-minute target, then the schedule should not be accepted.  At the end of the day, our schools should be about safety and learning.  Any practices that jeopardize either of those priorities should not be allowed to continue.

We look forward to continuing to work with members of the PSC and hope that our issues can be addressed in a timely manner.

Sincerely,

Blair Hilts

President

cc:        The Honourable Kathleen Wynne, Minister of Education

Rick Johnson, President, OPSBA

            Ken Thurston, President, OPSOA

            Mary Jean Gallagher, Chair, CODE

            Pierina DeCarolis, Office of the Premier