School board, union reach deal
Durham District School Board chair Mike Barrett says local bargaining is, for all intents and purposes, complete. The board and the union representing secondary school teachers were ordered into arbitration as part of provincial legislation that ended a strike that kept students out of the classroom for weeks earlier this year.
By Graeme McNaughton/The Oshawa Express
The Durham District School Board and Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation District 13 have agreed to accept an arbitration deal that will conclude local bargaining, according to the board’s chair.
However, he warns, there is still a long way to go.
“Being able to solve the local issues does not necessarily a provincial deal make,” Mike Barrett, the chair of the school board, tells The Oshawa Express. “We’re still under a work to rule for September that had started in July for the secondary teachers. We’re still facing that prospect. We’re still facing the prospect of the elementary panel still doing work to rule, which is having an impact on planning for September, and we still have CUPE to deal with. That’s our janitors, secretarial staff and (early childhood education workers) are still out there as well.”
This new deal, however, does resolve many of the local issues that the two parties were having, Barrett says.
“It’s an encouraging step because at least there’s some movement. For better or for worse, the local discussions are now finished because we got a conciliated piece that the mandatory arbitration is going to resolve one way or another,” Barrett says. “For all intents and purposes, the local bargaining is now over. We just need to keep focused on the provincial side.”
Both the school boards and the union representing the public secondary school teachers were ordered into mandatory arbitration as a result of the provincial legislation that ended the several weeks of strikes in late May.
Barrett says this is the first step in a long process toward getting a province-wide deal in place.
“It takes one small drip to melt a glacier, so this is the first drip, but there’s still a lot of melting to take place before we make it to the sea.”
Dave Barrowclough, the president of Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation District 13 did not return The Oshawa Express’ call for comment by press time.