Sask. high school basketball players getting 1 day on the court in place of full championship tournament
Band festival, skills competition among other events disrupted as teachers, province remain at standstill
Players won't be on the court Thursday in Moose Jaw after Hoopla, Saskatchewan's high school basketball championship, was cancelled.
Organizers had said the event would be called off unless job action announced by Saskatchewan Teachers Federation (STF) for Thursday and Friday — a provincewide withdrawal from extracurricular activities — was reversed by a deadline of 3 p.m. CST Wednesday.
That didn't happen, so the cancellation was made official. In place of the tournament, organizers announced a one-day event for Saturday, where every team that qualified for Hoopla would be invited to play a single game, with matchups determined by seeding.
Tammy Pantiuk's 15-year-old will be playing in one of the gold-medal games Saturday. The mother said that even though she and the students were disappointed, they understood the bigger picture behind the cancellation. Still, they are happy to get to play this weekend.
"Kids are very excited, families, parents, students, everybody's excited. We do have some graduates on both our senior girls and our senior boys team, so it's extra special for them to be able to play," she said.
She said students and parents support teachers in their fight for smaller classroom sizes and resources for complexity.
Pantiuk said she hopes the STF and the government can meet in the middle and come to an agreement.
John Latridis, the owner of the Mad Greek restaurant in Moose Jaw, said many small businesses are hanging by a thread and that cancellation of events like this one are a big deal.
"It's just another kick in the gut, to be honest with you, with how it's gone for small businesses over the last four years," he said.
The issues of classroom size and complexity are the sticking point in negotiations between STF and the province. The STF says they should be included in the teachers' contract, while the provincial government says they should be dealt with at the school division level.
Disappointed basketball players and students confronted STF president Samantha Becotte at the legislature after the budget was revealed Wednesday.
Alexis Lindgren, a Grade 11 student from Norquay School, said students don't feel supported because the championship was taken away from them.
"Learning doesn't end at 3:30," she said.
Becotte responded by pointing to the Saturday event, while also acknowledging it isn't what the students had hoped for.
"In the end, we want to make sure that kids are well supported. And we're talking about the 200,000 kids that are across the province getting all of their needs met in the classroom," Becotte said. "Extracurricular is important, but it is extra to the core business that we have in education."
Lindgren said she and her team spent more than 300 hours preparing for the tournament.
"Now it's just taken away with us because some adults couldn't get together and figure their stuff out," she said.
"It's hard to understand why they can't sit down and discuss things and find a way around it instead of using us kids as a way to get what they want."
Roger Morgan, chair of the Hoopla organizing committee, said it's disheartening that both parties are unwilling to come back to the table.
"I wish I could say it was surprising and shocking, but it's the inevitable reality of a negotiation that's at a complete standstill," Morgan said.
He said he understands that academic and classroom issues are more important and need to take precedence, but expressed frustration.
"I'm afraid that this scenario is going to be repeated, not just for basketball, but in the sports environment for badminton and track and field coming up too," he said.
Morgan said organizers had been planning Hoopla for 15 months, with 250 volunteers, 700 athletes, 150 staff, and an entourage of parents and grandparents. He said there will be an economic impact on Moose Jaw's hotels and restaurants.
Students and parents have been protesting against the STF's decision to cut extracurricular activities in multiple cities for days.
Becotte said the STF has given the government multiple ways to end the job actions — by agreeing to binding arbitration on class size and complexity, or allowing the government bargaining committee to include the issues in contract talks.
"We are deeply disappointed that the government simply refuses to meet teachers halfway," she said in a statement.
Minister of Education Jeremy Cockrill said he is disappointed that students cannot take part in Hoopla.
"They should be practising tonight. They should be getting ready to go to Moose Jaw and get ready to play games this weekend," Cockrill said.
"Because of the decisions by union leadership, they're not. The reality is that the STF leadership chooses specific sanction days to target certain activities. They've done that with Hoopla. They've done that with band festivals and I, you know, certainly I'm worried they may do that with graduation activities as as the school year progresses," he said.
Other events cancelled
The teachers' withdrawal from extracurricular activities on Thursday and Friday has also disrupted several other events provincewide, as of Wednesday.
The Optimist Band Festival, an all-age and all-skill-level concert in Regina that was expected to span four days, was cut short. It only ran Monday and Tuesday because of the job action.
The 2024 Skills Canada Saskatchewan competition, which was to be held on March 22 at Saskatchewan Polytechnic's Regina campus and Campus Regina Public, has also been cancelled.
The Western Development Museum in Yorkton has cancelled the Smarter Science Better Buildings event scheduled to be held on March 22. The half-day event was meant to be a learning experience about energy efficiency in homes for Grade 7 students from Columbia School in Yorkton.
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