THUNDER BAY – Local educators are joining their colleagues from across Ontario in hoping to take Premier Doug Ford to school about the perils of cutting education funding.
Dozens of Thunder Bay teachers and educational support staff gathered Tuesday outside the constituency office of Thunder Bay-Superior North Liberal MPP Michael Gravelle to hold an information rally about the importance of not taking money out of the provincial education budget.
Rich Seeley, the president of District 6A of the Ontario Secondary Schools Teachers Federation, said they are seeing some alarming trends coming out of Queen’s Park with the Progressive Conservative government.
“We’re very concerned for our students and for the state of our education system that Doug Ford is going to have some disastrous effects on us,” Seeley said.
“We’re trying to head that off at the pass. We’re trying to convince people that public education is an important investment, probably one of the most important investments in our communities futures.”
Seeley pointed to a Ford government decision made in December to cut $25 million in specialized programming in elementary and secondary schools across Ontario as a sign of things to come.
Recalling Ford’s campaign promise to slash four per cent from the provincial budget, Seeley said that would translate to $1 billion from education.
A $1 billion cut would result in a loss of jobs and a massive loss of service, Seeley insisted.
“Here in Thunder Bay, we have a population where we have high needs students in almost every building we have. They’re going to lose those supports,” Seeley said.
“They’re going to get lost in larger classrooms. They’re going to get lost in the fact they’re not going to have educational assistants supporting them. They’re going to get lost in the fact they have fewer technical supports in the schools. We’re going to lose custodial support, which is going to make the schools less clean and less safe.”
The government’s initial refusal to guarantee the continuation of full-day kindergarten, a position from which it eventually backtracked and committed to maintaining, made educators realize they could be facing cutbacks.
Seeley said teachers have held demonstrations outside nearly every Ontario MPP’s office in the last couple of weeks to hope their voices will be brought to the legislature.
“As the clamour in Queen’s Park increases, hopefully that message will get through,” Seeley said. “Certainly what I want in staff rooms across the city is my members becoming a little more aware and mobilizing themselves to talk to their friends, family and neighbours.”
