Ontario teachers are calling for more school funding from the province

Teachers, education workers, parents, and union leaders will be rallying tomorrow in five cities across Ontario. You'll see them in Ottawa, in Toronto, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, and here in London. They're calling for the province to invest more money in public education. Our next guest has been a teacher for 16 years these days, a science teacher at Banting Secondary School, also a union rep with OSSTF, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation. Julie Montez is here with us in the studio. Good morning, Julie. Good morning. I don't get a chance to talk to too many teachers today. What's it like in a classroom these days? It is pretty exciting and very, very busy. So I've been teaching for 16 years. And definitely, as a new teacher, things can be pretty busy in the classroom. But when I compare me as a veteran teacher to how I was 16 years ago, the classroom is busier than it has ever been because we have bigger class sizes than we did 16 years ago. And the students with diverse learning needs, so with individual education plans, so IEPs, has really gone up. And just the requirements of students and the support, the number of hands up and kids needing help has gone up exponentially. Yeah, so you've experienced both sides of the Zoom school, the COVID side of that as well, and shifts and changes there? Absolutely. Students tended to be a little bit more independent prior to COVID. and that was because they had a lot more support in the classroom with resources, so resource, they had more student success teachers in the school, we had more focus board support to help teachers do some professional development and a lot of those have disappeared ever since COVID, so people tend to blame COVID on students' success going down or these problems in the classroom, but it all is tied into a lack of funding for these students to have that support that they need in the classroom. We're hearing your perspective as a high school student, or high school teacher, I'm sorry. What are you hearing from folks who are teaching in elementary schools? That the classrooms are kind of like off the wall. I have friends who teach kindergarten, for example, who have 30, 32 students in their classroom, many with many diverse learning needs, and they have absolutely no educational assistance support, or their EAs have been cut from the classroom. So students who absolutely need that one-on-one support from educational assistants, they'll be told right before school starts, oh, by the way, we're pulling your EA because they're needed somewhere else in the system. So students who have these higher learning needs are getting less and less support, which means it's pulling teachers in multiple directions, as well as those ECEs in the classroom in kindergarten, that they're not able to provide the supports that these students require. What does that mean for those students? That means that a lot of the attention that students are going to receive will be less. And so you have students pulling those teachers and EAs and ECEs and pulling their attention most of the time, which means students who might not need that support will be getting less attention, which isn't fair to those students and not fair to those parents. What about families? What do you hear from them when they have conversations with you about the changes that you're discussing here? What I'm hearing from parents is that they're frustrated. They're frustrated that their child has definitely much higher needs. They have less options in school because they're cramming so many more students into classrooms. They're able to provide less electives and less opportunities for students to explore courses that they might want to take versus, sorry, before, aside from students, I'm saying this wrong, sorry, aside from courses that they want to take, they're having to take courses that they kind of are forced to take because that's just where the numbers are. And so a class that might run with 23 students is being cut so that they can put them in classes that they're shoving kids 30, 32, 34. Any examples of those classes that might be something that a student was looking forward to or had on their registration list that isn't available because of those class size shifts and changes you might see more elective courses so things in the arts so you might have music classes that will be cut you'll have visual art classes or I speak I teach at a French immersion school so students who might be looking for a French immersion course would then be required to take it in English because they don't have as many students subscribe to the class that they need to run it what about technology here we know two coins right either on one side it helps the other side it hurts what have you seen as something that's been an asset from technology that maybe has helped with these issues or these problems that you're experiencing inside of a classroom or are there? For me personally in my classroom I find the phones have very large distractions so I have the students put their phones away in like a cell phone hotel and the only time that I let them use it is if they're doing like additional research because we're limited with the number of devices we have for students in our schools. So, the technology we have in our buildings is dying. So, back before COVID, there was a one-to-one Chromebook project, for example, where six pilot schools, every grade nine student was provided a device to do their work. So, that would be using, say, Google Docs to do any word processing, additional research. And now, we're more reliant on them having their own personal devices, which isn't very equitable for students because there's many students who don't have devices. And so we're relying on their devices if they need to do research because the technology in our schools is dying and there's no funding to help replace those. I thought these devices were supposed to be banned. I thought we were getting these out of schools. So with the cell phone ban in the schools, so I would say depending on the classroom, so my own classroom, I don't find cell phones are as much of a problem because I take them every day. But when you have a very addictive device in a student's hand, it's hard for them to not want to pay attention to the notifications. After all, that's how the apps on the phones are designed. So every teacher is able to regulate that in their own way. And if teachers have issues with students on their devices, they do have the support of the office. But it is very hard to manage when you have large class sizes and students kind of sneaking phones here and there. To be able to see that is a lot more difficult now than it was 10 years ago. That gets us back to the conversation we're having here and what's going to happen on this weekend. This rally will take place holding strike votes in a few weeks here. What do you want parents to know about what teachers are going through? Classrooms are full. Teachers are burnt out. And we are very willing to help and support students. That's not the issue here. The issue is that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to support every student in our classroom because of how big the classes are, how we have less supports. We're trying to do more with less, which is not very possible for teachers. So ultimately for parents and families who have children in the education system or people who don't have children in the education system, this is our future. So when we're not providing the supports for those students to learn effectively, the outcomes of that are going to be less than ideal. And that is the future of our workforce. If you had the premier or the education minister sitting across from you, what would you say? Give us more money. We need to support students. You've underfunded us by six and a half billion dollars since you've come into power in 2018. And when you look at enrollment growth and inflation, and inflation's been kind of out of control, we are so underfunded and understaffed. We have people leaving the profession, people not even wanting to enter the profession because they know that it's an exhausting job and it's so impossible to make that difference that you know you can make with no resources available. I got to leave it there because of time, Julie, but thank you so much for joining us this morning. Thank you so much for having me.