The start of every school year comes with routines — some new, some old. One thing that has become familiar for me at the start of the school year is the back-to-school news interviews. This year was no different.
One focus for media has been cell phone bans, specifically the discrepancy of implementation dates for the cell phone policy. The ministerial order guiding the use of cell phones and social media in schools came into effect Sept. 1, 2024, yet school boards have until Jan. 1, 2025 to have policies in place that comply with the new standards. This makes no sense. If you work in a school, you know how smoothly bringing in new rules at mid-year goes.
The other topic that has grabbed the media’s attention is the opt-in process for instruction on human sexuality. What will this look like and how will the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) respond? Having not seen any legislation on this yet, it’s hard to say right now. However, given that parents already receive notification on human sexuality instruction and can opt out of said instruction, it makes me wonder what problem the government is looking to address here. In fact, when a reporter asked me what I had heard from members about this issue, my response was … not much.
What I have been hearing from members is how their class sizes have grown, how they do not have adequate resources to address their students’ needs, how there are no educational assistants, how they are wondering just how they are going to implement literacy and numeracy assessments. In short, they are wondering how they are going to make this school year work. That’s what they are wondering about, not a policy decision that is several weeks away. They are too focused on the students in their classrooms, sitting right in front of them.
Recently, the ATA released its latest ad campaign that drives home the fact that our schools are the least funded in Canada. The chronic underfunding of public education is profound and affects every aspect of our working lives, and we cannot lose focus on that. We cannot get distracted by other issues, even when there are so many things we are dealing with all at once. Remember, that is by design. If they keep us busy with one thing, maybe we won’t notice the underfunding. Believe me, we noticed. As teachers, we know this game. Our students try to pull it on us every day and it won’t work this time.
This year, despite what the media is gravitating toward, let’s keep focused on the key issue affecting public education: the lack of funding for education in Alberta thanks to a government that seems to think our public education deserves the least.
