School will begin in September as usual for Wellington Catholic District School Board students.
At 3am on Aug. 25 the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA) came to a tentative agreement with the provincial government and the Ontario Catholic School Trustees’ Association.
“We appreciate the government’s efforts and those of the Catholic school trustees in reaching this tentative agreement,” OECTA president Ann Hawkins said in a press release.
“We worked hard to address the concerns of our members and believe this agreement will protect them as well as the quality of education in our schools.”
Now that a tentative agreement has been met, work-to-rule job action has been suspended during the ratification process.
“That’s been the biggest stress on everybody,” Wellington OECTA president Mark Berardine told the Advertiser. “The football coaches normally have open camps and you can imagine everybody will be relieved that there’s an agreement in place.”
Local presidents were to meet on Aug. 27 in Toronto to discuss the agreement and on Sept. 1 they’ll meet again to vote. If the agreement receives support from local presidents, members will make the final vote on Sept. 17 through an online system.
OECTA represents 50,000 elementary and secondary school teachers in Ontario and has been in legal strike position since Aug. 17. Of particular focus during the negotiations were data collection, workload, hiring and wages.
“The frustrating part is the stuff that they had put on the table last year … the harshness of the language they were proposing and that, it’s really disappointing that we even need to go through this because what we’re probably going to get is what we would have accepted right off the bat and then no one would have had this anxiety,” Berardine said.
