Students in our region react to possible education workers’ strike

Education workers from the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) are planning to strike on Friday after continual negotiations with the Ford government have failed.

School boards in our region will be affected differently by the strike. In Niagara, both the public and catholic boards will close all elementary and secondary schools. In Hamilton, the catholic board will be closed while the public board will remain open.

Unless CUPE and the province can make a deal on Friday all the public and catholic elementary and secondary schools will close in Niagara. Including West Niagara and Blessed Trinity Catholic high schools in Grimsby.

Students CHCH News spoke with have mixed feelings about the potential closure. Some students support the aim of CUPE workers to get a better deal than what the government has offered. Others disagree, saying workers are looking for too large a raise.

Most students told CHCH News a one-day strike doesn’t worry them much, saying they believe the impact on their education would be slight.

However, some students were concerned that the potential strike would drag on. “Hopefully the strike isn’t for too long and we can go back.”

Many students are concerned about a return to online learning, like during the pandemic, “I know for me personally I don’t do well with like online school.”

In Hamilton, the situation motivated 16-year-old Orchard Park student Noah Chafe to share his criticism of the Ford government’s attempts to resolve the dispute in a lengthy social media post.

Chafe says what CUPE is asking for is reasonable, “I think that it is the support workers that definitely make up for these funding shortfalls, and I think what the government is doing is using them as pawns and from a student’s perspective it really hurts because it’s their smiles and their kindness and their sense of duty that everyday light up the schools.”