Media release: School safety protocols across the province need to be evaluated and enhanced immediately to ensure students, teachers, staff and their families are safe from highly infectious COVID-19 variants, says NSTU President Paul Wozney.
Lily Barraclough: During the pandemic stories depicting frontline workers as heroes have been numerous, but educators of all kinds and including homeschooling parents, have been somewhat forgotten.
Larry Haiven on when a raise isn’t a raise, the journalists who fall for it, and what made us lower our expectations so drastically that we now accept cuts to our incomes and becoming poorer as our lot in life.
Paul Wozney: “Today, just like they have done every day for the past three months, almost 150,000 Nova Scotian children and adults (up to 35 at a time) crowd into small poorly ventilated classrooms where masks are not universally required, which also lack proper handwashing stations. Nowhere else is this tolerated. If you hosted a gathering like this in your home, you’d be fined.”
School has started, but it’s not too late for governments to listen to the experts (teachers, medical professionals, parents) and make plans to transition to smaller classes now before a second wave hits us and forces us to shut down schools entirely, writes Molly Hurd.
Press release: NSTU President Paul Wozney says schools are currently in a state of chaos and aren’t ready to welcome students back next week. He says the Regional Centres for Education (RCEs) and the Conseil Scolaire Acadien Provincial (CSAP) are entirely focused on trying to promote the government’s unsafe return to school plan to the public. As a result the basic things that should take place on the ground to prepare schools for learning just aren’t happening.
News release: The NSTU is calling on the government to release a full list of schools across the province where Early Literacy Support teaching positions have been cut.
The provincial government is engaged in an orchestrated effort to move education jobs out of the union sphere. 1000 school principals, 200 or more school psychologists and speech and language pathologists, social workers and new positions in the expanding Schools Plus program will no longer be unionized. “While this may be a less sensational way of weakening the unions than, say, imposing wage freezes and concessions that force teachers and other education workers out onto the picket line, it poses no less a threat to their very existence,” writes John McCracken.
A news release by the Nova Scotia Teachers Union on the occasion of Bill 72 becoming law.
Abolishing locally elected school board trustees in favour of government appointees is a threat to democracy and to the right of representation. It completely removes the local voice in education, states the Canadian School Boards Association in this news release.