Potential salary freeze for teachers dismissed

Shannon LeClair

Times Reporter

 

On Jan. 27 a press release was sent out from Golden Hills School Division, GHSD, stating there was a potential salary freeze for teachers on the horizon. Representatives from the Government of Alberta, the Alberta School Boards Association, ASBA, and the Alberta Teachers Association, ATA, were involved in closed-door discussions about building workforce stability in education and enabling continued collaboration on the changes to the kindergarten to Grade 12 education system. 

“On Friday, (Jan. 28), the three parties that were in the tripartite discussions agreed that as no final agreement had been reached between them, that they would step away from that,” said Dave Price, chair for the GHSD.

 “There are actually not any ongoing negotiations happening at this point in time.” 

He said they were looking at different ideas to attempt to meet some of the goals of the province in dealing with their deficit overall. One of the ideas included was the potential salary freeze. Another idea was to reopen the current contract and replace it with a new agreement. There had been a proposal to reduce the number of instructional hours for students. Reducing the hours was a potential adjustment to help make it feasible, but has also been dropped. Currently, regulations require 950 hours for Grades 1 to 9 and 1,000 hours for Grades 10 to 12. GHSD exceeds those hours with Grades 1 to 6 receiving 960 hours, and Grades 7 to 12 receiving 1,010.