Richmond - Open letter to Linda Reid, MLA, This past school year I taught a child, who because of deficits in his/her ability to process receptive and expressive language, scored in the first percentile for his/her age range.
Richmond - Open letter to Linda Reid, MLA, This past school year I taught a child, who because of deficits in his/her ability to process receptive and expressive language, scored in the first percentile for his/her age range. Changes made to the ministry's criteria for designation of his/her disability means that he/she does not qualify for any additional support. This is a child who is unable to speak or to process what he/she has heard. At the beginning of my career, this child would have been fully supported. Now, he/she is lucky to receive help from a speech language pathologist once every two weeks. This is not conjecture; this is a fact.A colleague who works in an inner city classroom in Vancouver had nine children in her class of 22 who are ministry-designated students with a range of learning difficulties, physical, and mental challenges. Nine. There are thousands - thousands - of stories like these; these classrooms exist. These children exist. This is not conjecture; this is a fact.Rather than facing these facts head-on, they are ignored, and swept aside by rhetoric that education funding has increased - the problem is, it hasn't kept up. The fact is, government routinely downloads costs onto school districts (MSP rate increases, carbon tax, increases to wages - most notably CUPE's wage increase in the fall of 2013, BCTF's in 2006 - hydro increases, gas increases, inflationary items such as school supplies), and now costs associated with seismic upgrading. This past spring an unprecedented number of districts made cuts to programs, supports, supplies, personnel, and infrastructures in order to balance their budgets. This is not conjecture; this is a fact. Learning Improvement Funds are a small step, but since their creation, have been open to misuse both by government, which recently used the LIF to fund CUPE's June 2014 collective agreement, and by school district management teams that award funds to schools who did not apply for funds and deny them to schools who did. This is not conjecture; this is a fact.I've been teaching for 20 years. I experience on a daily basis, first hand, the results of what the past decade of cuts to education has done. The "best possible deal for teachers" includes better supports for students. I do not know how this can be made any clearer and is something government cannot continue to choose to ignore.Sharon HalesRichmond
