The B.C. government has countered teachers’ strike plans with wage rollbacks and a partial lockout, with each side accusing the other Thursday of putting students in the middle of a messy dispute as provincial exams and graduation loom.

Wage reductions begin Monday, the same day the province’s 41,000 public school teachers plan to stage rotating, one-day strikes over four days in the province’s 60 school districts.

The B.C. Public School Employers’ Association, which bargains on behalf of the government, sent the union a letter Wednesday outlining terms of the lockout. High school teachers will be locked out completely on June 25 and 26, while elementary school teachers will join them for one day on June 27. Schools are scheduled to be closed to students on those days, putting the pressure on teachers by targeting their paycheques, said BCPSEA chief negotiator Peter Cameron.

The letter says salaries will be reduced by five per cent as of Monday due to Phase 1 of the strike, in which teachers have stopped supervising students outside the classroom or communicating in writing to administrators. It says this pay cut will increase to 10 per cent if teachers follow through with their plan to walk off the job. Such wage reductions have never been levied against B.C. teachers during labour disputes.

Teachers will also be forbidden from working during lunch and recess, and can only arrive at school 45 minutes before classes start and must leave 45 minutes after classes are finished.

B.C. Teachers’ Federation president Jim Iker painted a dire picture of exams left unmarked, student activities cancelled and graduation ceremonies in jeopardy — all of which he laid at the feet of Liberal Premier Christy Clark.

“The premier, who once promised to put families first and who just (Wednesday) said that children should not be put in the middle, is launching significant disruptions to our education system,” Iker told a news conference Thursday at the union’s offices in Vancouver.

Iker said the restrictions on when teachers can be at school will make participating in extra curricular activities impossible and warned teachers could be disciplined for actions such as assisting a student during lunch hour.

Cameron countered that the lockout would not impact instructional time for students, unlike rotating strikes by teachers. He said there is nothing in the lockout that would prevent teachers from participating in voluntary extra curricular activities or attending award or graduation events, even if they occur on school property.

Cameron also said the terms of the employers’ letter to teachers are not set in stone and that a compromise allowing teachers involved in marking provincial exams to do so with pay is “certainly doable.”

Teachers want higher wages along with commitments to make classes smaller and increase the number of specialists in schools, demands Cameron said would cost over $2 billion and possibly result in human rights complaints if composition rules resulted in a disabled student being turned away from a class, for example.

The union has referred the lockout and wage rollbacks to the Labour Relations Board, which is due to hold a hearing May 29.