School support staff job action affecting Niagara College students

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The recent job action by elementary teachers hasn’t evolved into a strike yet. But as of today it’s now keeping some students out of the classroom.

There is a group of students, college students who are not in the classroom today. About 20 students from the Early Childhood Education program at Niagara College were told not to report to their co-op placements today.

The reason for this is that they are supervised by members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which stepped up their work to rule campaign today. They are calling it phase two of their work to rule job action and a part of it is that teachers will not supervise college students who are assigned to a placement within the school.

Once they were told that the students would not be supervised, the District School Board of Niagara made the decision to keep the Niagara students out of the class. Some of the Niagara students are worried about this affecting their credit.

“We understand that college students have some concerns” says School Board spokesman Brett Sweeney. “What we remain hopeful for, is that the union and the government can come together on a fair negotiated settlement which would allow them to lift the job action and allow college students to return to our classrooms.”

Dave Veres is from Niagara College. “This impacts our 2nd year students right now. We’ve got plenty of time for them to be able to ensure that they get all of their learning outcomes in place by next April.”

He also added that Niagara College is working on finding interim placements for some of their students, but it is on a student by student basis. So there is a possibility that this action by the teachers union will keep student teachers out of the class until a settlement is reached.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misstated that teachers would be supervising, and that they were members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees. In fact, they are supervised by support staff, who are members of CUPE. The teachers are represented by the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO). The headline has also been updated.