The Nova Scotia Teachers Union and a lawyer with the firm that represents it say the government is on very shaky ground if it plans to move principals and vice-principals out of the bargaining unit.
“The government may not have considered the legal impacts of their proposed changes,” said local labour lawyer Ron Pink.
He said there are considerable charter issues and collective agreement problems with the government proposal.
“It is likely that it will have to be solved in litigation.”
What the government has proposed is the adoption of all 22 recommendations included in a report by consultant Avis Glaze intended to overhaul the province’s public education system.
The report recommends dissolving the province’s seven elected English-language school boards. Glaze also recommended a provincial college of educators aimed at giving teachers more professional standing and the removal of principals and viceprincipals from the NSTU, moving them instead into a new professional association to eliminate what she called the conflict of interest that exists between administrators and teachers being inthe same union.
Pink said the college proposal and the stripping of administrators from the union are huge problems.
Not so, according to Education Minister Zach Churchill.
“This is a response to independent reports that told us that this would improve the quality of education in the province,” Churchill said.
A very upset Liette Doucet, president of the 9,600-member teachers union, said the NSTU is considering all its options.
“We are looking at if there is any avenue to pursue to ensure that it doesn’t happen,” Doucet said. “We believe that our administrators are teachers first and they should be members of the NSTU. The way we work in a collegial manner with our administrators has worked and when it is not working the union is involved for both parties and we work things out. This will change that dynamic.”
The province’s 800 to 900 public school principals and viceprincipals make up about nine per cent of the union membership.
The minister said government’s preference is to work with the union on the changes.
“We know it’s consequential to them,” Churchill said. “We are willing to support them with transitionary funding to help deal with this. They provide a valuable service to their members but we don’t want to be jeopardized. The union membership is dictated in legislation and we believe that this is something that it is imperative that we move forward with, especially considering the two independent reports. This is needed because our focus is on the kids and what they need and we believe that giving principals that independence, relieving them of any conflict of interest, will allow them to be the instructional leaders that our kids need them to be in our schools.”
Doucet said both the report and the government’s acceptance of it are flawed.
“Taking the administrators out of the NSTU is going to do nothing to improve student achievement,” she said. “I’m not exactly sure what is going to happen to many of those administrators because many of them do teach as well. There are a few principals who also teach and there are many vice-principals who also have a teaching assignment.
“This is just another attack on unions.”
Churchill said the implementation of the plan is going to take some work, including the logistics of classifying administrators who spend time in front of a class.
“In terms of how this is implemented, this will require some flexibility. Again, we want to work with the union on this, to implement this smoothly. There are important details that will be answered as we move forward with this process.”
