On Nov. 1, I attended a forum hosted by several ATA locals in the southeast for the MLA candidates in the Brooks–Medicine Hat byelection. This was a great opportunity to hear specifically what candidates thought about current issues in public education and to clarify their thoughts about the future of public education.
The audience was made up of teachers, school leaders, other education workers and parents from the community. As you would expect, questions focused on curriculum, class sizes, the complexity of our students’ needs, education funding and mental health. I will not go into the specific details of each candidate’s responses, as most teachers can pretty much guess what the candidates said—we need to increase funding, provide supports such as adding more educational assistants to the system, and address the needs of students so that they can learn. It was all messages you have heard before.
Back in June, the ATA had a meeting with Danielle Smith, who also took part in the leadership forum the ATA hosted at our annual Summer Conference in August. During the most recent forum in Brooks, I was particularly interested to see if the new premier would be consistent in her messaging now that she has won the leadership race. For the most part, her comments were essentially the same.
The one answer I felt was amiss came in response to a question about whether or not administrators should remain part of the Association. The premier didn’t really address the question. Instead, she began her response by musing about “what is the problem that needs to be solved?” She then talked about discipline and the ATA’s regulatory function and school leaders’ roles in that process. As I sat in the crowd and reflected on my notes from previous meetings, it reminded me that the ATA must continue to reach out to elected officials to discuss the important nuances of public education.
After the forum in Brooks, and Smith’s subsequent election as MLA, I wrote a letter requesting more meetings with the premier so we can talk in further detail about the concerns teachers and school leaders are facing and to offer tangible solutions to these issues. As I drafted the letter, I recalled Smith’s closing comments from the Brooks forum, where she stated that teachers and government should not be adversaries and that she sees teachers as “equal partners.”
Well, I’d like to put those words to the test. ❚
