While School District No.57 (SD57) is dealing with a teacher shortage, it’s also lacking in associated professionals – most notably school psychologists – which is impacting students.
Katherine Trepanier, the Prince George District Teachers Association’s first vice president, brough the issue forward at SD57’s public board meeting Tuesday.
She explained that the lack oft teachers teaching on-call (TTOCs) means that associated professionals, which includes school psychologists, speech language pathologists, occupational therapists, Indigenous social workers and behaviour interventionists, are called away from their duties to cover classroom time.
“Almost every single school day this year the district runs out of TTOCs. On an average school day this year we’ve been short between 40 and 60 TTOCs.”
Trepanier said the district has one vacant school psychologist position and will probably have more vacant positions next year, but noted that school psychologists in the district are already overworked.
She said the national association of school psychologists recommends a caseload ratio of one psychologist to 500 to 700 students and the North American average is 1 to 1,352 students.
“At SD57 our school psychologists are at 1 to 2,500 students. This is at a tipping point. We may not be able to retain school psychologists due to unmanageable workload and caseloads.”
Trepanier noted that for speech language pathologists next year there may only be seven out of eight positions filled and for occupational therapists there are currently only two serving the entire school district.
“These shortages are particularly concerning because the CDC, the child development centre, has indicated that next year the kindergarten students coming in include more than the usual number of students with disabilities.”
She said because of the lack of TTOCs this school year alone students have lost at least 4,488 hours of support so far. In the last six years since they have been tracking the number of hours lost, students have lost out on at least 14,746 hours of support from these specialist teachers.
“This is lost support that our students never get back.”
She said this loss of support may be contributing to an increase in violence in schools as frustrated and angry students are not getting their needs met and are acting out and may also be contributing to teacher and associated professional burn out.
Trepanier asked the board to advocate to the provincial government for more funding, but also expressed concerns with the proposed 23/24 district budget which is facing a shortfall of $2.3 million.
“I would like to ask the board what are you doing to address the teacher and associated professional shortage? I am concerned the proposed budget does not reflect the actual needs of the district for its students and teachers,” said Trepainer.
The board is required to submit a balanced budget to the Minister of Education and Child Care by June 30, 2023.
