Jason Schilling, president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, discusses the upcoming school year with Alberta Primetime’s Michael Higgins. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Michael Higgins: Are teachers as excited to get back to class as kids are? Jason Schilling: There’s always an air of excitement to come back to a new school year, but we know the challenges that we had last year are still there. Teachers are still going to walk back into larger classrooms, complex classrooms, and though there’s been some movement towards improving those situations, we know there’s still a lot of work to be done there. MH: The provincial government announced some expanded funding for classrooms at the end of the last school year. So how is that translating into getting more teachers in front of classrooms this year? JS: That announcement came quite late in June, so we’ll have to see if boards were able to fill those positions for those classroom complexity teams. We know that not everybody was hired from the announcement in February, so there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, and we recognize the fact that the government is making an effort on this part. But we also know that they wouldn’t have done this without teachers’ job action last October. But you can’t change decades of underfunding in a couple of announcements. This will take more work throughout the course of the year. So, we will be looking for government and boards to still address complexity and classroom issues because it’s still a major issue. MH: What kind of clarity or expectations do you have around those specific complexity teams? Do you know the difference they’re going to make? JS: We’ll have to see. Every school is using them a little bit differently, and they have that ability to use those teams in a way that best suits the schools. But the government’s own data showed that there were still hundreds of more classrooms across this province that could use a complexity team, so we need to look at more funding to put these individuals into classrooms to make things better for students and teachers. MH: The finance minister forecasted this week a $2-billion surplus, significantly different from the $9-billion deficit that was talked about with the budget earlier in the year. How are you looking at that fiscal turnaround, and what that could say about Alberta’s road forward, where education is concerned? JS: I think we could use that money for sustainability. So we make an announcement in the spring for complexity teams, for example; it can’t be a one and done. We need long-term investment into education to improve the situation for teachers and students in our classrooms. So use this money wisely to make sure that we are doing a sustainable funding increase to education over the course of this next year, and the year after that, and then the year after that. MH: This time last year, we were talking about the month-long contract dispute that was front and centre, that dispute translated into a strike, and then back-to-work legislation by way of the notwithstanding clause. To what degree is that still top of mind for teachers one year later? JS: The stripping of the charter rights is still very much a wound that teachers feel across this province. They recognise that the government has put some more money into education, and they took a stand around that, and educational issues are front of mind for a lot of people. But that aspect of the charter rights is a really big factor for our members, and it’s something that government will have to address through the course of this year. MH: Is the ATA’s court challenge of the notwithstanding challenge still to be heard in the next couple of weeks? JS: We pushed that back into 2027 so that we could see the outcome of some of the other notwithstanding court cases across Canada. For instance, there’s one in Quebec, there’s one in Saskatchewan. That will best help our case out. MH: Many families at home, around the dinner table, are talking about everything from Canada-U.S. trade war tensions to the upcoming Alberta referendum with its questions on separation, immigration, constitutional reform. How do you see those conversations now landing in Alberta classrooms? How are teachers preparing for when they come up? JS: There is an aspect to the guide of education that talks about controversial issues or topics and how teachers are supposed to approach those, and that has been there for years. Teachers will use that guide to help them bridge those conversations within schools. And teachers follow the curriculum, and they pay attention to what’s there, and will handle those conversations as they come up. MH: ATA recently issued a statement about a third-party website asking the public to identify or comment on the actions of individual teachers. What’s at play here, and how is the ATA responding to that? JS: We already have a system in place with school boards and with the Alberta teaching commissioner to ensure that if a teacher should cross the line in terms of conduct, that they follow due process, that there are step-by-step procedures on how to do that. It shouldn’t lie within the hands of a third-party influence out there. There’s a system in place to do this, and the system has its own faults, but it still works. MH: How worrisome is this website? And are you doing anything about it? JS: Part of our job is to work with members, whether they’re in the conduct system or if it’s on other aspects that might be employment-wise. We work with our members, and we’ll work with our members on this. MH: Are there legal grounds to respond to something like this? JS: Potentially, we’ll see. MH: Do you have expectations of how the provincial government might respond to something like this? JS: I have yet to hear anything from the government on that. So, like I said, we have a system in place for this, and that’s the system that should be used for parents or community members, not to work with other people to try to circumvent that.
