“Ontario’s school boards are in severe crisis”: Survey of 12,000 CUPE education workers finds extreme underfunding and understaffing has caused widespread violence, burnout and lack of supports for students in Stratford-area schools

STRATFORD, ON –(COMMUNITYWIRE)– A recent survey of Ontario education workers including Educational Assistants, Early Childhood Educators, Child and Youth workers, custodians, maintenance and trades workers, and school secretaries represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and the Ontario School Board Council of Unions (OSBCU) shows that a severe crisis in underfunding has led to extreme understaffing, students’ needs going unmet, and increased violence in the Huron-Perth Catholic District School Board.

The CUPE-OSBCU survey included over 12,000 respondents from across Ontario, with over 150 education workers from the Stratford-area school board. The survey points to a crisis of understaffing in all classifications, causing insufficient supports for students and staff in schools and the Stratford community. School offices are overburdened by increasing demands, school cleaning suffers, and repairs are delayed or go undone.

Read the full CUPE-OSBCU Services Survey report for the Stratford-area.

CUPE 3615 represents over 200 education workers across the Huron-Perth Catholic District School Board, including Educational Assistants, Registered Early Childhood Educators, secretarial staff, library technicians and secondary hall monitors.

This school year alone, Huron-Perth Catholic District School Board has faced a minimum of a $5.09 million cut to real per-pupil funding.

Many education workers at the school board say they frequently face violent incidents at their workplace, over 90 percent of Educational Assistants are experiencing violent incidents on the job.

This severe underfunding leaves students and workers at risk because there are too few staff in schools. It also means students have their learning environments disrupted on a regular basis, creating an environment that is far from conducive to having the highest quality of education.

CUPE education workers across the province are calling on the Ford government to immediately increase school board funding, adequately staff school boards so that education workers can do their jobs with dignity and respect, and address the crisis of violence across Ontario school boards.

The OSBCU represents more than 57,000 education workers across the province.

Quotes:

Joe Tigani, President of OSBCU: It is abundantly clear that the education system in Ontario is at a breaking point. For years, the Conservative government has continued to cut billions of dollars in funding to the education sector, causing extreme understaffing, increased violence against staff and students, and our students’ needs being neglected. There is no question that the Ford government has abandoned the education sector. The Ontario government must increase its investment in students and education workers and address this situation immediately. Students deserve better, parents deserve better, and our education workers deserve better.

Shelly Swinkels-Herlick, President of CUPE 3615: The level of understaffing that has occurred is due to the deep cuts that the Provincial government has made to the education system. This has affected the quality of services we can provide to students, staff and our school communities. Our education workers take pride in the work we do, but we feel and see what the lack of funding has done to our education system. Students are not getting the level of support they once had. Staff are bouncing from one student to the next and do not feel like they are meeting the growing needs our students have. We once dealt with academics, but now we deal with that — and more! Our members are exhausted, our members are not only doing their own assignment but now must take on more to try and cover the needs of the growing number of students who require support. We need the Minister of Education to start caring about the future of our education system and put the funding back into the quality of education that our students, staff and communities expect and deserve.

Numbers at a Glance: 

• Funding cut at Huron-Perth Catholic District School in the OSBCU Services Survey Report: (4565 students): $5.09 Million  
• 53 percent of members say they do unpaid work for the school board, effectively subsidizing schools to make up for the lack of funding. Extrapolating the amount of unpaid work reported to the entire membership of these locals, an equivalent of 5.6 Full-Time Equivalent jobs worth of unpaid work are done by CUPE members.
• 87 percent of respondents say they feel stress due to an excessive workload.
• 86 percent of all respondents say they experience violent or disruptive incidents in their work area. 93 percent Educational Assistants or Child and Youth Workers experience violent or disruptive incidents in their workplace.
• 79 percent of respondents say there are not enough people employed in their own job classification at the school board or in their school. 82 percent of respondents said that services for students, staff, or the school community would be improved with more staff in their classification.

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For more information, contact:

Shannon Carranco, CUPE Communications
scarranco@cupe.ca
514-703-8358