Teachers’ union president Dean Ingram says student assistant hours currently allotted by the school district is well below what is needed.
The Newfoundland and Labrador Teachers’ Association (NLTA) filed an access to information request earlier this year and found the Newfoundland and Labrador English School District (NLESD) determined a need for 4001.5 student assistant hours in schools per day.
But when it came time to allocate the hours, the school district came up 418 hours short of that need, allocating 3583.5 hours per day of student assistant time.
The NLTA says its lobbying efforts were able to add another 100 hours to the allocation, but Ingram says the allocations are still well below where the school district itself said they should be.
Ingram says less student assistant time means teachers have to fill in those gaps, leaving less room for teaching.
“When there are insufficient allocations for student assistant time to support and provide for the physical needs of students, that work then falls to the teacher in the classroom,” Ingram stated in a news release.
As part of the NLTA’s research, the association says, an anonymous poll was conducted for school principals across the province. Of those polled, 71 per cent of principals said they were expecting cuts to student assistant allocations in the 2018-19 school year.
The survey suggests 84 per cent of respondents felt the student assistant allocation was not enough to meet the needs of their schools in the current school year.
The NLTA is asking parents to contact their local school board trustee and school council to raise their concerns, in hopes of increasing the student assistant allocation.
