Newmarket was home to one of the biggest solidarity day camps in the GTA this week, organized by a newly formed pro-public education coalition in support of striking teachers and education workers.
Lead organizer and Newmarket parent Shameela Shakeel, who is the co-chairperson of York Communities for Public Education, said community members pulled together and in five days planned the Feb. 6 and 7 camp in a show of solidarity for teachers and education workers on the picket lines.
More than 130 children from Newmarket, Aurora, Holland Landing and Sharon packed into the Newmarket Soccer Centre over the two days of back-to-back strike action by members of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO).
“It is a lot of work, I’m not going to lie, it takes a lot of planning,” Shakeel said Friday at the local soccer centre. “And I’ve been lucky. Parent volunteers have come out to help, donations came in from families, and some grades 7 and 8 students are here volunteering.”
“We’re doing this to support our families and show our support for teachers and education workers,” she said. “It was back-to-back strike days this week and for a lot of parents, we thought it was going to be tough to find options two days in a row. It was time to step up and help out the community.”
The Newmarket Soccer Centre offered a reduced rate, along with staffing support, and local businesses came aboard to carry out activities for the young students, including Aurora Family Martial Arts. Parent volunteers ran arts and crafts lessons, a games room, a henna station, and a milk bag mattress weaving activity that produced beds destined for those less fortunate overseas.
“We’re making beds for homeless people who have nowhere to sleep and we finished one already,” students Nadia Vera, 10, and Yaretzi Sanchez, 10, said. “We’re going to send them to a homeless shelter and people can sleep on them.”
Four other solidarity camps also sprung up in Toronto that, like the Newmarket camp, offered child care and activities for $10 each day or pay-what-you-can.
It’s not yet decided whether the local solidarity camps will be offered again next week, but if a deal is not reached between ETFO and the Ontario government, two walkouts are scheduled to take place on Tuesday, Feb. 11 and Thursday, Feb. 13 that will close public schools in York Region.
Ontario’s French-language teachers’ union, the Association des enseignantes et des enseignants franco-ontariens, plans its first provincewide strike on Thursday, Feb. 13, which will close down schools in the French-language boards.
For parent Shakeel, the extra work involved in hosting the two-day camps is effort well spent.
She lists high school class sizes and the government’s intention to remove a cap on student-to-teacher ratios, mandatory e-learning, and funding cuts to education workers that serve elementary students with unique needs as top concerns.
“We’re going to lose a lot of extra support staff with the education cuts, such as behavioural consultants, psychologists, EAs, and social workers, and this is at a time when we need more supports,” said Shakeel, who is an active volunteer at her local school. “I’ve seen it first-hand with the increase in complex behavioural needs, increase in aggression and violent behaviour, it’s a huge issue.”
“We see it in terms of physical and psychological harm for the children, and for staff,” she said. “We have a lot of staff who end up on medical leave. If we’re going to have inclusion in the school model, you have to have proper supports in place, or you’re just abandoning kids and it’s just not fair to them, or to the staff.”
A lot of local teachers are also parents, Shakeel said, and they feel the struggle as teachers and parents. Many education workers such as educational assistants and early childhood educators, for instance, struggle to make ends meet and only work for 10 months of the year, she added.
“The 2 per cent the union is asking for is a cost-of-living increase, it’s what everybody should be entitled to at least bargain for, not be told you’re not getting this,” she said. “So we all just have to be mindful of the fact that there has to be a fair deal.”
Meanwhile, bargaining talks between the ETFO and the government broke down over three days in late January and early February.
ETFO president Sam Hammond said in a Feb. 4 news conference that the parties were close to an agreement, but government negotiators changed course in the 11th-hour and tabled “impossible options” it knew the union could not accept related to fair and transparent hiring processes for occasional teachers.
Also, teachers’ salary was not addressed during that round of talks, he said, and the government’s position around special education funding remained less than half of what was negotiated in the union’s 2017 agreement.
“This funding was of great benefit to vulnerable students, it led to the creation of new teaching positions to support students with special needs,” Hammond said.
The union president also took aim at Education Minister Stephen Lecce’s repeated claim that teachers’ salaries are hamstringing the process.
“Let me be clear, despite what Minister Lecce is claiming, teachers’ salary was not addressed during those talks. And government negotiators did not sign a letter of commitment to maintain the kindergarten program. I know because I was at the bargaining table, the minister was not and has never been. He continues to misrepresent what is actually happening in negotiations at that table,” Hammond said.
In a Feb. 6 statement regarding continued job action by the elementary teachers’ union, Lecce said the government did commit to maintaining full-day kindergarten.
"Our government has put forward reasonable proposals at the negotiating table … and it is deeply disappointing parents are still seeing repeated escalation at the expense of our students to advance higher compensation, including more generous benefit plans,” Lecce said.
