PARENTS and school administrators on the North Shore are waiting to feel the impacts of stepped-up job action after teachers across the province voted Thursday to halt their involvement in voluntary extracurricular activities.
It's not clear yet how many activities like sports, drama and arts will continue with extra help from parents and administrators, and how many will get shut down. Teachers have already withdrawn from some after-school volunteering during the bitter labour dispute, but others have continued to coach and oversee activities.
"Now they're being told flat out no," said David Whitehead, chairman of the North Vancouver Parents Advisory Council.
"Parents will come forward and step into the breach to a certain extent," said Whitehead. But some of the larger sporting events that require school staff involvement to satisfy liability concerns may be harder to pull off, he said.
Teachers voted 73 per cent on Thursday in favour of a plan that includes refusing to participate in any extra-curricular or voluntary activities as a protest against Bill 22.
So far, the decision on whether to coach or take part in other activities has largely been left to individual teachers or in the hands of local unions.
Most teachers in West Vancouver stopped volunteering last month, after their union took a stand against involvement in extracurricular activities. In many cases, parents have stepped in and taken over coaching, said Elaine McHarg, president of the West Vancouver Parents Advisory Council. Students have been running clubs mostly by themselves, she said.
In North Vancouver, teachers' involvement in activities has been mixed.
Pam McLeod, a teacher-librarian at Sherwood Park Elementary in Deep Cove, was one of the local teachers who took part in the vote Thursday. McLeod, who coaches cross-country, puts on musicals with the students and sponsors book clubs, said the decision to withdraw from volunteering was very difficult. "I would never want to disappoint children and parents," she said. "I was probably the last person to vote on my staff. That's how hard it was."
But McLeod said teachers are "united in our horror at what's happening with our education system."
McLeod said most teachers don't want to be political, but the move was needed to get the public's attention.
Mark Jefferson, assistant superintendent for the North Vancouver school district, said graduation banquets and ceremonies will still go ahead. But sports programs will be more difficult to accommodate without help from teachers, he said.
He added administrators won't know until next week when they meet with the representatives of the North Vancouver Teachers Association what the impact of the decision will be.
On Friday, teachers were ordered by the Labour Relations Board to complete report cards by the end of this month.
Whitehead said it'll be a relief to many secondary school parents to get the marks. "Some of those can impact the ability (of students) to get into post-secondary education," he said. "It's a relief to know we will be getting grades."
Susan Lambert, president of the B.C. Teachers Federation, called the decision to back out of coaching and volunteering "wrenching" for most teachers. "It's not something we come to lightly," she said. "Parents ought to be angry," she said - but added they should be angry at the government for allowing the educational system to deteriorate over the past decade.
Representatives of both the West Vancouver and North Vancouver teachers associations were in meetings Friday and could not be reached for comment before press time.
Bill 22, the controversial law passed last month, imposes a six month suspension on all strike action by teachers and appointed a mediator to negotiate a deal between the BCTF and the employer within certain strict guidelines. Those constraints prevent the mediator from considering any proposal that would increase overall costs or that would tie in caps on class sizes. The bill also imposes hefty fines on any individual teacher who takes part in a strike.
