HALIFAX -- Nova Scotia's education minister expects public schools to be closed for up to a week starting Monday, depending on the passage of a bill that would impose a contract on the union representing 9,300 educators in the province.
Karen Casey said Sunday that she recognizes the school closures are an "inconvenience" but concerns for students' safety have to take precedence, given what she says are the risks posed by the Nova Scotia Teachers Union's work-to-rule job action.
"There was no superintendent in this province who could say to us, 'We can guarantee that the child will be safe,"' said Casey. "I knew that they were nervous, I was nervous. We had to make a decision that would protect students."
Casey announced the school closures on Saturday, sending parents scrambling to find childcare with less than 48 hours notice. She compared the situation to a "storm day," suggesting school boards provide little more than a few hours notice when the roads are deemed unsafe for travel.
Parents received "as much notice as could possibly be given," Casey said in an interview, after the provincial government reviewed the risk assessments of eight superintendents regarding the job action proposed by the NSTU.
After failed contract negotiations with the provincial government, the NSTU directed its members to do the minimum amount of work required under the current agreement, including arriving at school 20 minutes before classes begin and leaving 20 minutes after they end.
Casey said Saturday that these directives would "put our students in an unsafe environment," citing concerns about students being stranded in schoolyards, unsupervised in classrooms and children with special needs arriving on buses and getting to class without teacher assistance.
NSTU President Liette Doucet said in a statement Saturday that if the provincial government were concerned about students' safety, it would have let students go to school where teachers would have been ready to teach.
"With this step, our government is showing that it will do anything except negotiate with teachers," said Doucet. "Instead of negotiating with teachers in good faith, this government has decided to take away their collective rights and impose a contract ... one that doesn't address the core problems with our education system."
Nova Scotia's House of Assembly is set reconvene Monday to consider legislation that would extend the tentative agreement reached by the province and the teachers union in September through to July 2019. If passed, the legislation would make job action illegal until the contract expires.
The Liberal government is prepared for round-the-clock sessions, Casey said, but even still, legislative procedure will hold up the bill for at least a few days. Casey said she could only offer a "rough timeline" as to when the bill will become law but said the process could drag on for up to a week depending on the assent of Opposition parties, law amendments and public hearings.
Both the Conservative and NDP leaders released statements over the weekend voicing their objections to the bill.
While kids rejoice about homework extensions, teachers and staff are expected to go to work Monday morning even though classrooms will be empty. Some parents have posted to social media saying they plan to drop their kids off at school regardless.
Community groups and businesses including the Canada Games Centre, the Boys and Girls Club of Truro and Atlantic Cirque have offered programs for students, while The Old Triangle Irish Alehouse is providing free lunch for kids.
On sites like Kijiji, self-proclaimed caregivers have advertised services ranging from makeshift nurseries, to 12-year-old babysitters offering to look after their slightly younger peers.
It's just these sort of unvetted childcare providers that frustrate Hannah Munday, a mother of three young children, who has had to turn parents away from the daycare she runs out of her home in the Halifax area as the union-government standoff has escalated in recent weeks.
"This kind of thing doesn't encourage young families like mine to see being here long term," Munday said. "I don't see how thousands of students with no place to go and parents only having 36 hours to find somebody ... is safer than sending them to school."
Shannon Harris, who has three kids under the age of seven, said she plans to stay home from her job making Christmas wreaths at farm near Bridgewater to look after her brood, even if it means losing a paycheque -- or if the closures drag on, going on unemployment.
Harris said she is sympathetic to both sides of the union-government standoff, but as a parent, the idea of school children being left unsupervised at lunch "scared the living daylights" out of her, especially when it comes to her primary school age daughter who has a food allergy.
Misty Hillier, a mother from Halifax with three teenage children, said even without the school closures, said she wasn't planning on sending her 15-year-old son with special needs on the bus Monday morning without assurance that someone would be waiting for him at 8:00 a.m., before teachers are set to arrive.
Hillier said other school programs that would be cut under the union's job action -- like swimming, cooking and extra-help -- are essential for her son, and without them, he wouldn't be getting the life skills he needs.
The Nova Scotia Parents for Teachers Facebook group, which has more than 16,000 members, is planning a rally in downtown Halifax Monday that some have dubbed "Take Your Kid to Legislature Day." Protesters are encouraged to wear pink to stand against "government bullying."
Even though she has retired from active work, Casey said she "will always be a teacher" and recognizes that most educators go above and beyond the duties in their contract.
"As a teacher I recognize that (classes) are not the same as they were when I was there. There were challenges then, there are even greater challenges now," Casey said. "When teachers sit down with me and explain those, I can understand and we certainly have provided every opportunity for teachers to do that."
