School District 43 classrooms continue to feel the strain of last spring's budget cuts despite the infusion of $1 million in education funding that was part of an agreement that ended a protracted labour dispute in September, the Coquitlam Teachers' Association president said Tuesday.
In his first presentation to the board of education this year, Charley King described the impacts of cuts felt by teachers and called on the board to lobby for more education funding and set priorities to restore cuts during budget talks this spring.
In one school, he said, learning assistance staffing was drastically cut, while in another parents were "shocked" to find speech and language pathologist services were only available one day a week. King said parents are having to pay privately for psychology assessments because wait lists are too long.
"Last year's cuts were too deep," King said, referring to $13.4 million in cuts made last year to balance the budget. "Let us know what we can do to help you attract more funding to Coquitlam."
He noted that while other districts were able to hire more teachers with education funding from the $75 million earmarked by the province, Coquitlam had a net loss of 49.53 positions, and province-wide there was a net loss of 67.73 FTE teachers, he said.
"That means 73% of teacher positions lost across the province occurred right here in School District 43. That's a pretty staggering figure."
Board chair Judy Shirra said financial information will be presented at the next board meeting and should go some way towards reducing the "stress" from cuts, but "we know it won't get us back to where we were," she said.
The district is projecting a balanced budget for the current school year and will begin budget deliberations when it has more firm numbers on education funding later this spring.
