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Perspectives is an opportunity for Fellows and others to share their ideas in short, accessible essays. IPE/BC Fellows hold a range of views and interests relative to public education.

The Community School Model- Just Imagine!

By David Chudnovsky

August 29, 2023

Imagine a small elementary school in a low income suburban community. The teachers are a mix of veterans and younger folks. It’s a really tough job as many of the students come to school hungry and have difficult home lives, but the teachers are enthusiastic and committed. Several of them have been teaching there for almost 30 years. They’ve all thought of looking for easier placements, but they can’t bring themselves to leave these kids.

There’s an evening program for adults – with courses in everything from belly dancing to introductory business skills to gymnastics – and there’s a ceramics studio with a kiln and slip and glazes that’s used by the kids during the day and adults at night.

Students work with a community curriculum developed by the teachers that reflects the experience of residents and neighbours.

Adult Basic Education classes are taught in a couple of empty classrooms during the day and in the kids’ classrooms in the evening – from basic literacy for people who can’t read or write to high school equivalency GED prep sessions. For more than 30 hours a week dozens of adults share the school with the elementary students.

A group of neighbourhood women meet in the school to organize a childcare centre and it’s just about to open in the community centre down the street.

A Community Newspaper is published four times a year through the school.

There’s a seniors group that meets monthly and organizes outings, and also arranges for older neighbours to volunteer in classrooms and interact with the elementary students.

In a portable in the parking lot behind the school is a re-entry program for teenagers who’ve been out of school for at least 6 months. The school recruits those students through local social service agencies, high school counselors and the media.

During the summer, a day camp runs using the school building and its facilities.

There’s a lunch program. Volunteers from the neighbourhood come into the school to make sandwiches or hot dogs – but it’s hard to get the money to make the program permanent.

There’s a community program run out of the school called Shape Up. A couple of the Shape Up staff will help you renovate your house, clean out your garage, landscape your backyard or do any one of hundreds of home improvement projects that keep getting put off. But residents have to contribute. Some help with the actual work of the project at their home. Some store the tools. Some make lunch and dinner for the workers. One guy sharpens and repairs the tools.

There’s an annual fundraising fair at the school, but it has to be scheduled for social assistance cheque week. If it isn’t, there’s no money to raise.  But when it is, the whole neighbourhood participates, they have a great time, and some funds are raised to support the programs.

The School Board employs a teacher to organize and facilitate all of this, plus a night school monitor (paid for out of the fees for the night school courses), and a part time secretary.  However, the real leadership is provided by a Community Board made up of neighbourhood folks who advise and decide on the various programs, advertise, and explain what’s going on at the school to their neighbours, and advocate to the School Board and other governments and agencies for the various programs and activities at the school. Some of them are parents of kids at the school. Some of them aren’t.

Sound good? A bit too good to be true? Pie in the sky? Not at all. That program – with a lot more elements – existed and flourished in a North Surrey neighbourhood for decades. I was lucky enough to be the Community School Coordinator – the teacher hired by the Board to run the Community School Program for close to ten years, and while it was a hard job, it was enormously exciting.

Neighbourhoods with Community Schools knew, and still know, that they are certainly cost effective, but more important, they build cooperation, educational and social success, and resilience.

The Community School model – with different characteristics in communities with different needs – came to an end in Surrey in the late 1980’s as a result of yet another budget crisis.  But it still exists in some jurisdictions.

What a wonderful experience –  using school resources and space to meet community needs. Those elementary school students learned so much from the range of people who themselves benefited from the school’s programs. The kids learned they were part of a community. They learned they could build and strengthen their neighborhood. They learned that seniors, and adults learning to read and write, and the fellow who lived down the street and sharpened tools, were all important parts of their lives. They learned what it means to be a citizen.

While you’re thinking about what was, imagine what could be. What if we added a Community Health Clinic and a Social Services Office to that Community School? What if the School Board meetings were held in each Community School once a year? What if the local First Nations were part of and  the programs at the School?

What if School Boards and the Province really understood the value of schools as part of the wider community, understood schools as the building blocks of stronger and more resilient communities? Imagine a renaissance of Community Schools across BC.

Just imagine.

David Chudnovsky worked in nursery, elementary and secondary schools and at the university level in England, Ontario and BC during his 35-year teaching career.  He is a past-president of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation and was an elected Member of the Legislative Assembly in British Columbia Legislature from 2005-2009.  David is co-author of the Charter for Public Education.

 

 

Perspectives is an opportunity for Fellows and others to share their ideas in short, accessible essays. IPE/BC Fellows hold a range of views and interests relative to public education.

Attention to Staffing Shortages Urgently Needed

June 3, 2023

By Larry Kuehn

Teachers are frontline workers in the creation of the future. A teacher shortage is a hazard in developing that future and we are facing a teacher shortage in BC public schools.

The early warning indicators are already here. Community members without teacher qualifications are placed in some classrooms. A lack of teachers on call are available to fill in behind teachers away because of illness. Staff lose their planning time as they are pulled in to cover thousands of classes without their regular faculty member. Students with disabilities are sent home, deprived of their right to education because their specialist teachers are required to cover classes for missing colleagues.

Demand for teachers will only increase with a growing population and expanding expectations of the schools. The problems are already here and will explode into a crisis unless we act now. We need both immediate action and long-term planning and commitments.

How did we create this dilemma? It sometimes helps to look at how a problem starts to see how to get out of it.

A reduced demand for teachers in early years of the 21^st Century gave a false sense of the real need. School enrolments did decline for a few years. More significantly, the BC Liberal government in 2002 cut about 3000 teachers, eliminating by legislation staffing provisions in the teachers’ collective agreement. This contract stripping created a sudden teacher “surplus.”

This left a pool of qualified teachers as precarious workers. Part-time, moving from one school to another, being laid off every year, hoping to find a position for the next term. Even those with full-time positions worked for lower pay scales than teachers in most other provinces. Not surprisingly, some gave teaching up as a career while others who might have become educators looked elsewhere than teacher education.

The situation changed just as suddenly in 2016. The Supreme Court of Canada affirmed a lower court decision that the government in 2002 had violated the Charter rights of teachers in arbitrarily cancelling conditions that had been negotiated by the BC Teachers’ Federation. The class size and other staffing provisions were restored, returning education services that students had been deprived of.

With some 3000 teaching positions restored, all those precarious workers now had job offers—and there were not enough to fill the demand, let alone prepare for future needs.

The teacher shortage might have already received significant public attention except that it has had to compete with another crisis—the shortage of people in the health care system, as well as other areas crying about the need for workers.

The BC government has recognized these other demands and has provided funding for increased training positions in health care, technology, and trades. However, education has been an afterthought, if a thought at all.

What can be done to address this teacher shortage?

In the short term, we can look to the same place as is health care—immigrants who have been trained and, in some cases, have experience in the countries they have come from. This does not mean going to recruit elsewhere—that has its own shortages—but people who have already immigrated, often with their education and training being a major factor in why they were accepted as immigrants. When they arrived, they discovered that their qualifications aren’t accepted and there is a long and expensive road to getting recognized. Reducing the red tape would help a bit and some progress is being made in that.

The longer term solution is clear—train more teachers and make the job more attractive to retain those who join the profession.

Some progress in making the profession more attractive has been made with the pay increases recently negotiated by the BCTF. Many of the problems, though, will not be solved until there are enough teachers so that everyone can count on a replacement by a qualified substitute when they are away ill. They will not be solved until we stop grabbing the special needs teacher away from their students or the librarian from the library to cover the classroom teacher who is away. And the teacher shortage will not be over until every student has a qualified teacher—not someone with no training–meeting their educational needs.

It is past time for the government to recognize that public education, like health care, requires urgent attention to staffing shortages.

To meet current demands, and to be prepared for increased demands for teachers in the future, the BC government must place a priority on increasing the number of places in universities for teacher education candidates. And it must provide financial support so that future teachers don’t have to add on to student debt in order to make their contributions as front-line workers in the creation of the future.

 

Larry Kuehn is a member of the IPE/BC Board of Directors and chair of the Research and Programs Committee.  He is a research associate for the CCPA and retired BCTF Director of Research and Technology. He has written extensively on education matters including funding,  globalization, technology and privacy.