Most summer school classes on the North Shore will likely be cancelled unless the teachers and the province reach a deal within the next week.
That could affect about 1,400 students who had planned to take summer classes.
Administrators in both North Vancouver and West Vancouver are holding off making final decisions as long as possible.
This week, however, the teachers union said pickets would be set up outside sites where summer school is usually held and teachers who usually teach those classes won't be on the job.
The province has asked the Labour Relations Board to declare some summer classes - which allow high school students to pass courses they have failed - an essential service.
But that only covers a small percentage of the courses generally offered in the summer.
In North Vancouver, between 600 and 700 students usually register for summer school, said Laurie Martin, district administrator for the program.
That includes a remedial 40-hour program for students in grades 8 to 10, which allows them a chance to pass courses.
It also includes a more popular 80-hour program that offers entire courses in a very compressed timeframe. Most students who sign up for summer school take that one, said Martin. Some students even rely on it to complete courses needed for graduation.
But if summer school is behind pickets, those courses won't go ahead.
Classes normally start on July 3, but "We're looking at pushing it back to July 7," Martin said.
About 300 students are also registered for online courses over the summer in North Vancouver. Martin said it isn't clear yet how those courses would be affected by a summer strike.
West Vancouver School District is in a similar situation.
About 700 students there have registered for summer school, but only a "tiny percentage" of those have signed up for remedial sessions that might be declared essential services, said spokeswoman Bev Pausche.
If summer school is picketed, both full-credit courses and elementary classes will be cancelled. She added the school district may not even have enough staff to teach remedial classes.
So far it's not clear whether any day camp programs run out of schools during the summer months would be affected by a continuing strike.
Fran Bourassa, who runs community school programs at Norgate, said the annual summer camp for elementary school kids focusing on outdoor education is going ahead as planned. But she said it's been difficult to get the word out to parents.
Registration has definitely been lagging, she said.
"Usually we're pretty full by now."
Daniel Storms, president of the North Vancouver Teachers Association, said the union hasn't worked out who will be on the picket lines when teachers are usually on their summer break. Mary Jo Hunt, a high school English teacher and mother of three children who go to school in North Vancouver, said after weeks on the picket line, teachers are feeling "frustrated and confused and passionate and angry."
Hunt said she usually teaches summer school and relies on that income. She added her kids have learned in the past two weeks "what protest looks like, what standing up for what you believe in looks like."
On Thursday, Education Minister Peter Fassbender said the government has no plans to legislate teachers back to work. He said the province is prepared to consider mediation but added the two sides must be closer together for that to work.
