Union job action: Unlocked school doors worries Sudbury parent

Morning North7:08Schools doors remaining unlocked during school day because of job action

Nicole Sykes says she was disturbed to find out the doors to her children's elementary school were being kept unlocked without her knowledge. It's all because of a continuing labour dispute between school secretaries and school boards.A Sudbury parent says she's worried that recent job action by education workers could be putting the safety of her children at risk. 

Secretaries with the English public, French Catholic and French public school boards in Sudbury are no longer operating the buzzer that allows people to enter the elementary school buildings.

Because of that, several Sudbury schools have begun to leave the front doors unlocked during school hours.

Nicole Sykes, who has two children at a elementary school in Sudbury, said the risk of something happening "is low ... but the consequences would be catastrophic if something happened."

Union representatives for the secretaries told CBC News refusing to use the buzzers is necessary job action after more than a year without a contract. English Catholic board secretaries are not unionized.

They say it's the decision of school boards to leave the doors unlocked.

But the Rainbow District School Board says it's asked the union stop this specific job action.

Parents not told

Sykes said news of the unlocked doors "disturbed" her.

"To find out now that this is optional, and that parents were not even being told, that this was the case, I was angry."

Locked doors are not part of provincial safe school legislation. Instead, it's up to each school board to have a locked door policy.

James Clyke with the Ontario Secondary School Teacher's Federation, which represents school secretaries in Sudbury, said the principal is the one who makes the decision on whether or not they're going to open the doors.

"We certainly don't want to take any job action, let alone this one," Clyke said.

"We don't want to take the other 49 that we're doing either. But at the same time we're starting to be a little frustrated with the Ontario Public School Board and the government in regards to these negotiations."

'Just one layer of safety'

Norm Blaseg, the director of education with the Rainbow District School Board, said he shares "the parents' concerns," and wishes the locked door policy was in place.

However, he said "every school still as a monitor, every school still has a process where — when visitors enter the building — they are to report to the main office. They are to get visitor tags. They are to wear those tags and sign in."

"The locked door is just one layer of safety for our students," he continued.

"We want to ensure that we're able to get it back as soon as possible and we hope that the parties negotiate it do get it back."

It's little comfort for Sykes, who pointed to "the horrific things we see about school shootings" as one of her reasons for worry.

"We're not immune to those. The day-to-day risk could simply be domestic abductions," she continued.

"Those things do happen with unfortunate frequency in our country. We don't know the situations of every single child in these schools. There are well over 400 children at the school my kids attend. It would be very difficult for everybody to know every nuance and every parent and every person that should or should not be there."

Sykes added she's sympathetic to the process of labour negotiations, but she sees the situation as a shared responsibility.

"The unions need to recognize that, while they say that they won't be doing anything to put the safety of students in jeopardy, they clearly are doing so," she said.

"I think that the board then has an absolute obligation to communicate the risk to parents effectively and to mitigate those to their best of their ability. I think absolutely that this policy needs to be changed at whatever level of government ... to make sure that the school doors of elementary schools are locked."