The chair of Ontario’s second-largest school board has accused the provincial high school teachers’ union of launching local strikes that use students as “pawns” just to push Queen’s Park for more funding.

Janet McDougald, chair of the booming Peel District School Board, reacted fiercely Tuesday to news the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF) will walk off the job in the region’s 36 high schools May 4 if the board hasn’t reached a deal with its 3,500 high school teachers.

It is the third of seven boards targeted for labour disruptions by the OSSTF; Durham’s high school teachers walked out on their 24,000 students Monday and Sudbury’s teaches are slated to strike April 27.

Ironically, McDougald noted not only is local bargaining actually going well in Peel during this new two-tiered system of negotiating, but none of these local deals can be fully sealed until the big-ticket money issues are resolved at the central tables.

“It is very disappointing that OSSTF provincial has tried so hard to make it seem like this is about local issues. That is deliberately misleading to our parents, (42,000) students and staff,” said McDougald in a statement shortly after OSSTF announced the May 4 walkout. “The fact is, all major monetary items have to be resolved at the provincial table. This is all about putting pressure on the provincial negotiations.

“Our students are being used by OSSTF provincial as pawns in their strategy,” she added. “That is not fair. That is not right.”

The Ontario Public School Boards’ Association and the provincial OSSTF are trying to hammer out the core of a contract for all high school teachers across all public English-language high schools. Meanwhile, local school boards are left to work out non-monetary items.

“It’s my opinion that we could reach a local agreement if the province had their negotiations in place,” McDougald told the Star.

“We’ve made really good progress locally — there are always some things outstanding, and there were a few things on the table that were monetary that we couldn’t resolve, so we sent them back to the provincial table,” she said.

Mike Bettiol, president of the OSSTF local in Peel said in a statement Tuesday, “our collective agreements expired in August of 2014, and since that time our members have shown a great deal of patience despite the slow pace of bargaining.

“Their work both in and outside of the classroom becomes more demanding all the time, but the employer has refused to address their concerns in any meaningful way at the bargaining table.”

But McDougald said there are already three days of talks scheduled before May 4 between the board and the local union, and “with this announcement, I will go to the board to see if it’s beneficial to accelerate those meetings” and add a few dates.

She called the bargaining process “very difficult … and I think there may be too many moving parts here, and certainly parents do not understand any of this. It doesn’t bode well for public education.”

Ontario teachers are engaged in a new, more formalized system of bargaining established by Queen’s Park, which many expected would be slower, this first time, as many of the ground rules need to be agreed upon, in some cases with advice from Ontario’s Labour Relations Board.

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With the new formal two-tiered system, there have been debates over which items would be bargained at the province-wide “central” tables and which would be left for local school boards and their own teachers to hammer out.

However the OSSTF has warned that not only are talks moving too slowly, but early proposals by the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association to scrap a seniority-based hiring system, which teachers like, could prove a stumbling block at the table, as could a request for teachers to take another unpaid day off.

As well, many resent Education Minister Liz Sandals’ edict that any raise must be offset by cuts somewhere else.

With the OSSTF alone — which represents only high school teachers in English-language public school boards — there are seven school boards targeted for upcoming strikes if no local deals are reached, including Halton, Waterloo, Ottawa and Thunder Bay.