Budget cuts create chaos in the

Budget cuts in 2020 left many classrooms without the educational assistants teachers often rely on. PHOTO: LEGACY IMAGES

Budget woes mean Alberta EA’s are MIA

Millions in budget cuts and mandatotry COVID-19 restraints have caused big shifts in classroom help

Ashley Torpe’s most powerful memory from her career as an educational assistant is a simple one: the rst time one of her students said her name. The boy had a learning disability. So Torpe worked closely with him. But, up until February of last year, he referred to her simply as “teacher.”

Torpe was at the playground when he turned to her and said, “You know I know your name, right?” It was this simple gesture that made Torpe feel ful lled.

These kinds of connections with students make educational assistants an integral part of Albertan classrooms. But those positions are often vulnerable to budget cuts, something every school board in the province is familiar with.

The United Conservative Party has put those boards under an even greater nancial strain at a time when the pandemic has made those assistants even more important.

Wing Li, the communications director for Support Our Students [SOS], describes the role of EA’s as giving “one to one attention and support” to students who may need it.

A 2018 thesis by a Minot State University student also found EA’s play a major role in providing all students equal and accessible education.

In that study, which focused on the Saskatoon Public School Board, one EA was quoted as saying, “Educational assistants play a vital role not only in the education of special needs students, but also the students falling through the cracks in the educational system.”

That explains why Torpe, who works in an elementary school in Wainwright, Alta., says, “The kids do have an EA in their class, you can see them going leaps and bounds [farther] than the kids that don’t have an EA to help them.”

However, despite how essential teaching assistants can be, school boards sometimes don’t have the money to pay for them.

Typically, the majority of their budget will go towards sta ng, whether it’s teachers themselves or support sta like EA’s and custodians. According to Schilling, each board will have its own di erences in terms of how it allocates that money.

That means, even at the best of times, schools don’t always get the number of EA’s they need or want. Torpe says in her own school, teachers are often told, “We don’t have the funds, we don’t have it in the budget, we can’t a ord to bring another EA on.”

Alberta Teachers Association President Jason Schilling says situations where EA’s are lost, can be “detrimental to [students] learning.”

CHLOE MACEACHERN

cmaceachern@cjournal.ca

But 2020 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought a whole new level of challenge for educators.

In a press conference on March 28, 2020, the Albertan government announced they would temporarily funnel $128 million away from educational funding to aid in COVID-19 safety measures.

This resulted in roughly 25,000 education workers being laid off, including most of the EA’s, sparking a major provincewide outcry.

Those that remain are having to do more with less.

Vicki Child, an EA working in a rural school in Killam, Alta. says she usually works with small groups of students for individualized learning but, now, her one-on-one time with students is limited due to the required social distancing measures and limits on how many students she can work with.

The introduction of these COVID-19 safety measures, such as continual sanitization and mask-wearing, have left many EA’s worrying these measures will cause disruptions, which could have long lasting effects on all students.

Torpe says, for younger students, safety measures for inperson classes such as staggering recesses and hallway times can make it challenging for them to refocus on classes.

“It’s interrupted their learning a lot…there’s a whole 20 minutes where they’re not learning, and they could have been.”

Child also notes these measures eat into time that should be spent working with students. “I’m continually moving around and assisting students around the classroom, which means I’m frequently applying hand sanitizer.”

The shuffling between in-person and online classes is another challenge.

At the beginning of the school year, teachers and EA’s had to juggle students as they shifted between learning platforms. This created gaps in education equality, which EA’s often had to fill by working with teachers to provide paper resources and adjusted learning plans.

Filling these gaps has proven to be an added strain for EA’s as they work to maintain quality of education, not only for the students they work closely with, but for every student.

Schilling says this effort from EA’s comes in many forms, including making sure “kids have paper packages to back them up” if they don’t have a reliable internet connection.

But, despite these efforts, there will still be gaps in the classroom because of fewer EA.

As a result, Li says, “You’re going to see this sort of catch-up mentality. There’s going to be added pressure in the coming school year to catch back up to the people who were able to keep up… What we’re going to see is widening inequality.”

Both Li and Schilling agree the government can help by increasing funding.

“We want our schools to be open, but we want them to be safe, and we need to put the funding into the re-entry plan. But they [the government] weren’t doing that,” says Schilling.

Li agrees, saying, “I think that obviously the funding needs to be restored and it actually needs to be increased from the restoration because we were already behind for 2019.”

He adds the ATA also pushed for required reductions in class sizes which would allow for better social distancing. This in turn would have required that all the EA’s to be hired back.

In response to these requests for funding, Justin Marshall, a spokesperson from Alberta’s education ministry, said, “School boards can also use the federal COVID-19 funds to hire additional staff.”

Ultimately, Schilling maintains that the redirection of funding was “a shock after shock after a shock in one school year [...] and it put everybody in a really bad situation and scrambling to find ways to make things work.”

“You can see them going leaps and bounds [farther] than the kids that don’t have an EA to help them.”

> Ashley Torpe