Yukon schools continue to struggle with shortage of teachers-on-call, emails show
CBC
Yukon schools continue to grapple with a shortage of teachers-on-call — a situation that was particularly dire at the beginning of the 2023-24 school year, according to emails between principals and education department officials.
Teachers-on-call are the Yukon version of substitute teachers, covering teacher absences, but as their name suggests, work on a standby basis. The shortage has forced principals to get creative in order to make sure classes are still taught.
At F.H. Collins Secondary School in Whitehorse, for example, only approximately 40 per cent of teacher absences were covered during the first four weeks of school, with other staff, including educational assistants, filling in the gaps.
One week, the coverage dropped to only 32 per cent.
"I think you will find this data as troubling as we do," principal Ruth Burridge wrote to education department staff on Sept. 18.
The same week, the Holy Family School Council wrote to education officials, including Minister Jeanie McLean and deputy minister Mary Cameron, to request their "urgent attention and action to address a chronic Teachers on Call (TOC) shortage."
"Our school has been operating on a deficit since the beginning of the school year with absences, and this is unacceptable," the email reads. "Our administration is needing support which they are not receiving despite requests."
The emails were among dozens obtained by CBC News via an access-to-information request, and offer a view into what Yukon Association of Education Professionals president Ted Hupé said has become a "repeat problem."
"Every morning, the principals are triaging their situation ... as to how they're going to cover the classes and the students that they have," he said in an interview, adding September was exceptionally bad.
"We were in a critical situation where we just didn't have enough bodies."
Linda Lamers, a superintendent with the Department of Education, told CBC News she hadn't heard from principals that this school year has been worse than others, but said the department was "actively recruiting on a daily basis."
"We are really actively working alongside our school communities, working alongside our community partners, working with the union to get creative on really acknowledging that this is an issue right now," she said. "And we're doing everything we can to find recruitment and working on retaining people in the education system."
Data provided by the department showed that as of Dec. 19, there were 270 registered teachers-on-call in the Yukon, up from 259 earlier in the month. Twenty applications were also pending.
Getting coverage for absences, however, is more than just a raw numbers game, according to Hupé and the emails.
More Alberta seniors are now eligible for a provincially funded RSV vaccine.
More than 100 workers at a steel plant in eastern Ontario are being laid off either temporarily or permanently, as a company with facilities in Quebec and Ontario cuts its workforce due to challenging market conditions — including U.S. tariffs.
A small town northwest of Thunder Bay, Ont., has become the unlikely home for hundreds of foreign workers, but many may have to leave the community they've embraced after the end of a federal program put in place to fill gaps in Canada's labour market.
There's mixed reaction in Waterloo to an injuction allowing police to detain, arrest and charge anyone who is participating in unsanctioned street parties in that city this weekend.
Diabetes Canada is excited about Prince Edward Island's new pharmacare deal with the federal government, but hopes the province will reevaluate copays on diabetes supplies, says a senior manager with the organization.
After 26 years of accommodating guests from across the world, Faith Embleton says she and her husband Ken are ready to sell their bed and breakfast.
A group of big-name companies including Google, Meta and Dow have signed a pledge to support tripling the world's nuclear energy capacity by 2050, a signal of the technology's growing resurgence in popularity.
Five years on, Toronto-area doctors and public health officials are looking back at what they've learned since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and most agree the early experience will prove useful if the city faces another infectious disease crisis.
City staff would like Londoners to take a good look around their home and ask themselves a direct and possibly difficult question: Could everyone in your family survive at home, without leaving and with no other help, for a full 72 hours?
Liberal Leader Mark Carney will officially become Canada's next prime minister within a few hours, taking the reins as the country barrels toward a general election and continues to fend off verbal and economic attacks from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Recent cyberattacks in Newfoundland and Labrador should have been a wake up call for the federal government about the reality of an increasingly hostile world, says one cybersecurity expert.
A recent CBC News analysis found that Nova Scotia is rapidly losing some of its most affordable apartments, but housing experts say there are ways to prevent that.
Premier Susan Holt is defending her decision to not use electricity exports to Maine as leverage against U.S. tariffs, arguing the move might cause long-term pain for New Brunswickers.