A B.C. Court of Appeal ruling in favour of a Port Alberni teacher over class composition won't have much effect on how the policy is carried out in School District 57 but it's still an issue, says Prince George and District Teachers Association vice-president Matt Pearce.
In a ruling issued Wednesday, the court found the teacher's school violated provincial legislation when it failed to assign a substitute educational aide to her classroom during the time the regular aid was away from work during the school year.
The teacher had been assigned four students with individual education programs (IEPs), one more than recommended in provincial legislation.
"It doesn't happen up here. When we do get resources in place they tend to stay in place," Pearce said Thursday. "We don't always get the resources in place that we request though."
So far this school year, School District 57 teachers have filed 40 grievances over class composition.
In some cases teachers agree to take on additional IEP students provided the resources to support them are in place, "but in other cases, those resources aren't there in the school and so the teacher disagrees," Pearce said.
Roughly 20 grievances were filed in the first semester and 20 in the second but largely from different schools, although almost all are secondary schools.
"It's very difficult to build a timetable at the secondary level in that administrators can't really have classes that are much below 20 students because the funding is such that those classes cost the school too much to run them," Pearce said.
"So they have to really fill the classes up in order to best use their resources and when they do that they sometimes get into real composition problems. When it gets up to 28, 29, 30 students in a class and you look at the composition side, it's six, seven or eight IEPs, that's where they get into a problem, where they can't get enough resources there to make it work."
The problem is not so large at the elementary level, said Pearce, because of the time it takes to assess students.
"There are only a certain number of people in the district who can do those assessments and they've got pretty large caseloads so some kids might go quite some time before they're assessed," Pearce said. "With very young children it's difficult to do the testing and very often the parents and the teachers know there is something that needs to be addressed, but there actually isn't an IEP."
