With the end of the school year looming and no end in sight for elementary teachers’ work-to-rule job action, the fate of report cards for Upper Grand District School Board (UGDSB) students remains unclear.
It has been more than a month since the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) first took job action on May 11.
Local public elementary teachers are among the 76,000 across the province who have not prepared comments for report cards, booked 2015-16 field trips, completed standardized testing or attended professional development sessions, among other actions.
Upper Grand ETFO president Gundi Barbour said another aspect of the May 11 job action was that teachers are not entering student grades into the electronic system.
“The teachers are still preparing marks, I mean the students are doing work and the teachers are evaluating that work and the teachers are still combining those marks,” Barbour said.
She also said teachers are still meeting with parents to discuss their child’s progress if necessary.
“Teachers are still looking at all those marks and are coming up with a final grade and then rather than entering it into the report card system they’re simply … giving that information to their principal.”
Now it is up to each individual board to decide how to distribute student evaluations, grades and report cards.
“To my knowledge, it’s not something that’s come out from the ministry, for instance,” she said. “Each board is making their own decision.”
UGDSB spokesperson Maggie McFadzen said board trustees discussed what to do about end-of-year report cards at an in-camera meeting on June 9.
“They looked at all the options available to them,” she said. But the trustees have not yet reached a decision.
Barbour said she heard one school board was only going to release a note to students (and parents) stating whether they had passed or failed for the year.
However, she said in the UGDSB teachers are still meeting due dates for reports.
“I know that in some schools [marks will] be due to their administrators at the end of this week or the beginning of next week,” she said.
“So those marks are going into the administrator.”
Barbour also noted the Upper Grand ETFO is currently in local bargaining and that is “moving along well.”
However, she said she cannot speak to what will happen in the fall.
McFadzen said she couldn’t confirm when trustees would make a decision on the fate of report cards – but she said it would be made by the end of the school year.
