Threat of teacher job action has high school students worried

Kitchener Collegiate Institute students walk along King Street with food they purchased at a supermarket on Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2013.

With three months left in her life at Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate, Claire Parrott has already been accepted to two universities.

Those acceptances are conditional on her finishing the science and calculus classes she’s taking this term – and that has her worried about the news Waterloo Region’s high school teachers are among several groups mulling job action as contract talks with the province drag on.

“That really would just throw everything off,” she said.

“If I can’t finish these courses, I can’t go to school.”

Fellow KCI student Jackson Doner is in the same situation with his final English credit.

“If I wasn’t able to finish that credit, I don’t know if I would be admitted,” he said, adding that he’d also miss extracurricular activities if teachers chose to withdraw from those while continuing to teach.

At Saturday’s annual meeting of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, president Paul Elliot told teachers that the Waterloo Region District School Board was one of seven boards where OSSTF members would take job action no later than the end of April.

“Our patience has run out,” he said.

Parrott says she’s hopeful universities will take any job action into account when dealing with admittance issues.

“I would definitely hope that they would look at it,” she said.

Glennice Burns, Wilfrid Laurier University’s manager of recruitment and admissions, says that’s exactly what will happen.

“We’ll work with the students,” she said.

“If it means that we have to extend some deadlines, then we’ll do that.”

Laurier has been issuing acceptance offers since December, and will continue doing so until May.

All offers are contingent on midterm grades, which are typically released in April, and on the students actually graduating high school.

The last contract between OSSTF and the province expired last August.