Teachers and parents of students in the capital region are raising the alarm about missing laptops and dirty desks a result of what they say is an underfunded public education system in B.C.
Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association president Carolyn Howe said classrooms are very different from what they were a few generations ago.
“If you went to school in 1980 at Campus View Elementary, you don’t have a really accurate idea of what’s going on,” she said.
Digital learning is widespread. It’s been about two decades since the schools began integrating students with special needs into regular classrooms, in what is now called an inclusive teaching model.
But Howe said funding for schools has been declining as a portion of the provincial GDP for several decades.
Custodial staff hours in her elementary school have been cut to just two hours during the day, she said.
As a result, tables — where students work on arts and crafts projects, eat food and do assignments — are only being washed down once a week, Howe said.
Teachers worried about the well-being of students are picking up cleaning work even though it’s supposed to be someone else’s job, she said.
“A lot of teachers are calling us with big screaming anxiety about going back to conditions that they dealt with in the classroom last year,” she said. “There’s a huge, wide range of needs in our class with usually one teacher trying to cover it all.”
A shortage of support specialists in the classroom is exacerbating teaching conditions, she said.
B.C. Teachers’ Federation second vice-president and Greater Victoria elementary school teacher Robin Tosczak said that urban school districts are seeing some of the staffing challenges that used to only affect rural school districts.
Meanwhile, the parent of a Grade 11 student said there aren’t enough laptops to go around for students this year at Oak Bay High after the school pulled hundreds of laptops out of service.
Jen Stewart said her son came home on the first day of school and told her that there was only one laptop for every three students in his class.
Concerned, Stewart wrote to the principal, who told her that 300 laptops had been taken out of circulation over security issues.
Previously, a class of 30 would have maybe 29 laptops and only one or two students would have to wait for their turn, she said.
It’s an issue for students who regularly use digital platforms such as Google Classroom to complete their studies, she said.
“Kids need technology to do their work and we’re not funding the technology that they need,” she said.
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