Teachers giving province failing grade on class size claims

Citing numbers significantly higher than 19, some Saskatchewan teachers are calling the provincial government’s average class size number misleading and inaccurate.

“I can tell you that in the nine years I’ve been an EA, I’ve never worked in class with 19 students,” said Desiree Hamilton, an educational assistant in a Saskatoon school.

Hamilton and Jessica Brown were at the legislative building on Monday and weren’t happy with what they heard during Question Period.

During the session, the Sask. NDP has been continually asking the provincial government about class sizes in the province’s schools, and provincial ministers have stuck with their numbers that the average class size is 19 students.

Hamilton said the province’s rhetoric is disheartening and feels disingenuous. The classes she has seen are more like 25 to 30 students.

Brown is a teacher in a Saskatoon elementary school. She said classrooms with 32 or 34 students aren’t uncommon.

They both said the needs of the kids in the classes are also more complex with learning, mental health and behavioural issues.

“If you have 25 average, typical kids that would be one thing, but when you’ve got 25 kids and 10 of them are EAL (English as an additional language), and 10 of them have mental health issues, and there’s so many other issues that make up the classroom, that education quite often ends up becoming a backburner issue,” Hamilton explained.

Hamilton said when she first started, things were easier. At that time, an EA would have one or two students in a classroom; now they have five or six, all of them with complex needs.

This year, Brown has 24 students in her class. She said she has been told she’ll be lucky to ever have a class that small again. She explained she had 28 students last year, and it was a very difficult year; she almost quit teaching.

Brown said the resources to take care of students continue to decline.

Minister Don Morgan, speaking on behalf of the education minister who was away on Monday, said the province has increased funding to education. He said classrooms must be hugely challenging, but he then put the spotlight on school divisions, saying the province looks to divisions to make sure they resource things properly.

Brown said the increase to education in this spring’s budget just brought the system back to 2017 levels, which basically means they haven’t had an increase in the past two years.

She said she spoke out because education is the cornerstone of our society and she wants the public to know what’s happening.

“It’s important that the public understands that, so we can advocate for changes in the system, so that we can advocate for increased funding to ensure that every child in our province is equipped with the tools that they need to succeed in our education system,” Brown said.