MiltonToday's sister site, BurlingtonToday, received the following letter to the editor from presidents of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association Halton elementary and secondary units:
To Minister of Education Jill Dunlop, MPP Ted Arnott, MPP Stephen Crawford, MPP Zee Hamid, MPP Effie Triantafilopoulos and MPP Natalie Pierre:
For years, Halton Catholic teachers have watched the erosion of Ontario’s publicly funded education system play out in our classrooms.
- School violence has increased, which is taking a physical and emotional toll on students and teachers alike.
- Class sizes are too large for teachers to give students the individual attention and one-on-one support that they need.
- Recent briefing documents produced by the Ford Conservative government warn of a future that Catholic teachers already see in our schools – a growing and dire teacher recruitment and retention crisis.
Underpinning it all is the Ford government’s active choice to underfund education, which has happened each and every year since it was elected in 2018. We know these issues will only get worse if immediate changes are not made.
In our district, with less than $1 a day per student for basic school supplies, teachers are forced to ration essential classroom resources, like paper and pencils. Halton schools do not have enough physical textbooks for students to use in class, nor are there enough functioning computers for them to access the texts online. We are forced to stretch ourselves thin, taking on multiple roles – becoming counsellors, behaviour specialists, and even administrators – on top of our primary teaching duties.
Catholic teachers want to do the job we love in a learning and working environment that helps students thrive and succeed. But we, along with teachers in classrooms across Ontario, cannot keep doing more with less.
Halton Catholic teachers are on the front lines of this crisis, and we live these issues alongside our students each and every day. We know what they need to succeed, which is why we are calling on your government to end the cuts and provide real and sustained investments in education. Our students deserve better.
Sincerely,
Tara Hambly, president, OECTA Halton Elementary Unit
Vanessa Slee, president, OECTA Halton Secondary Unit