Teachers are asking for their hours to be accounted for and that seems reasonable considering everyone knows being an educator is never a 9-to-5 job, but with that accounting must come accountability.
Details about confidential discussions between the Province, the Alberta Teachers Association (ATA) and the Alberta School Boards Association have been leaked and it appears teachers are asking for a cap on their mandatory working hours. If teachers want their hours to be capped, they must expect that they will have to account for and disclose all of their working hours.
Currently there is no legislation mandating how much time school boards can ask their teachers to work.
It is no wonder the issue has arisen because according to the ATA 60 per cent of school boards have negotiated an agreement, called assigned time, defining the maximum amount of hours which can be spent on certain job duties. Those job duties differ in each agreement. For example, at the Calgary Catholic School Division assigned time is relegated to 30 hours per week. Teachers are required to spend just over 23 hours per week teaching students and the remaining seven hours per week can be used for parent-teacher interviews, preparation, administrative tasks and supervising students. There is no mention of marking papers or volunteer work in extra-curricular activities, which may or may not bring them up to or above a 40-hour work week — the amount of time most full-time employees clock in.
Now teachers are saying the Province needs to define assigned time for all teachers and force the remaining 40 per cent of school divisions, including the two local school divisions, into adopting the practice of capping teacher’s hours.
Any parent with a school age child knows how much extra time their child’s teacher spends outside the classroom.
Most school days are just over six hours, but any good teacher is spending much more time than that preparing lesson plans, grading papers, helping students after school, running the school choir or coaching the basketball team.
However, that time is not recorded. It is unclear how much of that time teachers want included in the cap. Depending on who you talk to, it could be all of the above, or only instructional time with students, supervision time and professional development days.
The distinction is important because when you crunch the numbers the changes could result in some teachers working less than 40 hours a week or some teachers continuing to put in a tremendous amount of hours with no recognition or compensation. Before this system could work a system tracking all the hours each teacher spent in school-related activities needs to be in place.
Teachers say the system needs to be fair for everyone, but how can it be fair if the workload continues to vary from teacher to teacher depending on what each individual is willing to put into their job?
