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Katherine Korakakis’s 15-year-old son spent half of his last high school year without a full-time teacher.
For her 12-year-old daughter, it was even worse. She didn’t get a report card until the end of the year, because she was taught by substitutes who weren’t allowed to assign grades for the first three-quarters of her elementary school academic session. Nor could they hold parent-teacher interviews. Korakakis spent thousands of dollars on tutors to ensure her children were up to speed.
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“Without grades, without interviews, you have no idea how your child is doing,” said Korakakis. As president of the English Parents’ Committee Association, it’s a complaint that she’s been hearing for years, and it’s only been getting worse.
“I’m just one person,” she said. “This is not an isolated issue.”
Quebec Education Minister Bernard Drainville’s admission Wednesday that the school system is short 8,558 teaching positions came as a confirmation of parents’ fears, just days before the school year is set to begin. In a scrum with reporters outside the National Assembly Wednesday morning, Drainville called on retired teachers to consider coming back to fill the gaping needs, as well as university graduates who have studied subjects that are taught at the elementary and high school levels.
Last week, Drainville said the province would have to put untrained adults in some classrooms to ensure children had at least some form of supervision. On Wednesday, he said that without added support, he could not even guarantee that much.
Premier François Legault warned it would take years to cure the teacher shortage.
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Quebec schools have faced a severe teacher shortage for years, with many forced to rely on people who are not legally qualified to teach. More than 30,500 teachers in classrooms — over a quarter of the total number of 110,000 — were not legally qualified in the 2020-21 school year, Quebec’s auditor general found. Drainville stressed on Wednesday that the majority of legally non-qualified teachers had a bachelor’s or master’s degree.
“This is not a new thing — this has been going on since COVID. … And it’s a disaster because it impacts students’ success,” said Korakakis, adding that Quebec already compares poorly to other provinces in terms of graduation rates.
Merely having a university degree does not mean someone is sufficiently trained to be a good teacher, she said.
“Being a teacher is not just to be a subject matter expert. There are way more things that go into teaching than knowing science, for instance. If that was the case, everyone could be a teacher. We can all remember as young people having bad teachers, teachers who didn’t know how to teach, and how that affected your ability to learn something.”
The government’s attempts to tackle the shortage, which include increasing salaries, creating mentoring programs for new hires and trying to retain teachers on the verge of retirement, have not been sufficient, Korakakis said. “We are calling on them to find more creative ways to solve the problem.”
Korakakis also takes issue with new legislation, such as Bill 23, which seeks to give more centralized powers over school governance to the government.
“This government is great at finding problems with governance, but it’s not tackling student success in a very proactive manner, in our opinion,” she said.
“And that goes hand in hand with teachers. Because if teachers are not there, students are not learning. Period.”
rbruemmer@postmedia.com
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