VICTORIA – Reports of peace breaking out in the B.C. public school system have been greatly exaggerated.

After signing their first-ever voluntary contract with any B.C. government in 2006, the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, in effect the province’s third largest political party, was a relatively calm presence in the 2009 election campaign. Its propaganda effort consisted mainly of transit ads depicting lonely-eyed children neglected in the B.C. Liberals’ under-resourced classrooms.

It’s now clear that the BCTF’s hot war against the B.C. Liberal government hasn’t gone away. It’s turned cold, but it’s no less bitter or costly for that. Backing up those ads about neglected school kids was a wave of union grievances that may grow this year to a tsunami sweeping through 10,000 or more classrooms.

Arbitrator James Dorsey released a decision on some of those grievances last week, and reports of a big win for the BCTF were also greatly exaggerated by the media. This included my own initial news report, which speculated that the 21 classes Dorsey found out of compliance with the School Act were an indication of hundreds more violations of class size or special needs limits.

The B.C. Public School Employers’ Association is the government’s bargaining agency, responsible for the $5.4 billion B.C. taxpayers will spend on education this year. BCPSEA provided some much-needed corrections and context for news reports of the arbitration, which left the impression that those BCTF ads were right about under-funding and neglect being widespread in B.C. schools.

First, the 21 grievances that were upheld came from a group of 81 selected from more than 1,600 across the province. This means 60 of the sample complaints were dismissed outright.

Of the 21 that were upheld, only two classes were found to have too many students or inadequately supported special needs students, a situation Dorsey termed “inappropriate for student learning.” The rest were what BCPSEA called “process violations,” such as principals consulting with teachers on class composition as a group rather than individually. This after the affected teachers had agreed to meet as a group. A polite term for such complaints would be nitpicking.

The biggest BCTF arbitration “wins” were in Coast Mountain school district, which includes Terrace. There the problem is not overcrowding, but rather keeping classes large enough to be viable. It’s the proliferation of special needs students, defined as those having an individual education plan, that is the problem.

Juggling these students into manageable classes as they show up at school each fall is a daunting task for even a robust urban school district. In Coast Mountain, it took until the end of October to get classes sorted out, a month later than the Sept. 30 deadline specified in the government’s legislation.

The remedy for this supposed failure was to give one Coast Mountain teacher nine extra paid days off and others six days off. Substitute teachers will now have to be brought in to manage these special needs students and their classmates, while these teachers add more days off to the months of down-time their work schedule already provides.

So, in summary, we have two substantial problems out of 81 union grievances, after weeks of argument by two lawyers for the union and two more for the employer, appearing before another lawyer. This sample was taken from grievances over 1,622 classes in 157 schools across B.C. 

Those 1,600-odd grievances, filed for the 2006-07 and 2007-08 years, are just a warmup for the BCTF. They expect as many as 10,000 more this year, escalating a senseless power struggle over education that shows no sign of abating.

Tom Fletcher is legislative reporter and columnist for Black Press and BCLocalnews.com. Email him at tfletcher@blackpress.ca