School worker who lost job wonders who'll pick up pieces on behalf of kids in need
Contracts cut short as part of effort to save millions serving N.B. students next year
Summer vacation is just days away, and community schools co-ordinator Michelle Roy Brock is busy tying up loose ends before the end of the year.
Since being hired in March, she has been filling in the cracks at her Fredericton school, which includes taking over the backpack program that supplies children in need with food to take home on the weekends.
She has also applied for more than $80,000 in grants for books, winter clothing, lice kits and other necessities, and is trying to secure funding for accessible playground material for a child arriving in September who uses a wheelchair.
But what Brock doesn't manage to finish next week will likely fall on the shoulders of over-stretched teachers and remaining school staff.
Brock was told last month that her contract would end in June — one year early.
"What really hit me was the impact of not having my position here for the children," she said in an interview. "And not even just the children, but also the administration and the teachers, who work tirelessly around the clock, beyond hours, are underpaid, overworked, burnt out."
"The relief that I was able to bring to them is just suddenly yanked from them, and that, for me, was much harder to take."
Brock was one of five community schools co-ordinators who were told last month by Anglophone West School District that they wouldn't be needed next year, for a saving of just over $166,000. Five co-ordinators remain.
The news came two weeks after the district laid off nearly 70 employees for next year, including its entire library staff, in response to a $9.26 million budget cut from the province for certain programs.
That figure was part of a combined $43 million in savings that the Department of Education ordered the seven school districts to find. The order resulted in layoffs of library workers, educational assistants and administrative staff across the province.
But after weeks of outcry, the Education Department relaxed some of its belt-tightening on Thursday, announcing another $14.6 million would be shared by the districts.
A lot of that funding will be used to redistribute resources to positions that will be focused on literacy, numeracy, education and support services and to help with classroom composition.
Paul MacIntosh, the Anglophone West spokesperson, said the the district should know by the end of the week how many staff members will remain in layoff for next year. School library positions will not be reinstated.
Additional funding not enough, union says
Theresa McAllister, president of Local 2745 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, said the affected employees do important work, and she worries much of it will now fall through the cracks.
"Classroom teachers are not going to have the time to do those things," she said. "School clerical are not going to have the time to do those things. So it's sad because I think they're going to go undone."
McAllister said that despite the last-minute about-face by the department, the constant back and forth has everyone on edge.
"The morale is extremely low right now," she said. "Everybody is just waiting. Who's next? And that is the question on everybody's lip. Who's to say in October they're not going to come and say 'Oh well, we need back $6 million, so let's go to the next group.'''
Simon Ouellette, spokesperson for the Canadian Union of Public Employees, said the partial reversal last week "makes it worse because they demonstrated that they had money and they still decided to do nothing."
"It makes no sense that we should be seeing cuts. The province is growing. Some schools are bursting at the seams."
The library cuts work out to about $20,000 per job, totalling less than $1 million, he said. In the grand scheme of things, he said, there shouldn't be squabbling over margins so small.
Brock said the work she does is valuable, and the penny-pinching the districts are forced to do is "ridiculous and insulting."
She said nothing else matters "when our kids are hungry in the school, when our kids are unable to read or meet education levels — when at the end of the day, these children aren't getting their basic necessities met because you took away the people who were giving them those basic necessities."
'Not an environment I want to go back to'
As for what's next, Brock said she has accepted a new role with a non-profit organization, where she'll be involved in community engagement and securing funding.
Even if the cuts to the community schools co-ordinators are reversed, she wouldn't return to her old job, she said.
"They have shown me a lack of respect, a lack of dignity, and it's just not an environment that I want to go back to, even if they offered me the position."
"I love the students I work with, the teachers I work with, and the administration I work with. But I mean, I'm not a bag of garbage that they can just throw out whenever it's convenient for them. What I do has real purpose and if they aren't going to acknowledge that, then I'm going to move on somewhere that will acknowledge that."
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