VANCOUVER — With students heading back to school next week, families need to be prepared for the stark reality of the ongoing teacher shortage: some classrooms will be without teachers, said Glen Hansman, president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation.

Districts across the province have more than 270 full-time teaching, administration and special education positions open, and the province’s teacher job board is listing about 150 vacant full-time regular classroom teaching positions.

“Absolutely, 100 per cent guaranteed there are going to be classrooms come Tuesday that don’t have teachers in them, and that will continue to be the case throughout the first couple months of the school year,” Hansman said.

The numbers show that the province, which first saw a teacher shortage during the 2017-18 school year, is struggling to hire and retain teachers, he added.

“It’s a problem,” he said. “We’re very worried that we’re going to have a second school year under the NDP where there are going to be some kids in the Metro Vancouver school districts who might go through the first several months without having the teacher that they’ll have for the rest of the school year.”

As of publication, the province’s educational job posting site had about 20 listings for full-time classroom teachers in the Metro Vancouver area, some of which represented more than one vacant position. Provincewide, the number of listings for full-time classroom teachers totalled nearly 150, again with some of the listings hiring for more than one position. These numbers don’t include substitute teaching positions.

But one school district said despite its several listings on the website, it's not concerned in the short-term about having classrooms without a teacher come Tuesday.

“Hiring has been going fine,” said Deneka Michaud, the North Vancouver district’s communications manager.

But Michaud said her district is struggling to hire specialty teachers.

“Learning support teachers, French immersion teachers, we always have postings for those available all throughout the year just because there aren’t that many of them and they’re difficult to find,” she said.

The ongoing shortage has come in the wake of a 2017 B.C. Supreme Court ruling that ordered the province to reduce class sizes, and invest $550 million in operational costs to hire about 3,500 more teachers.

“The question is what’s going to be done above and beyond that ($550 million) so that school districts have a fighting chance to not just attract enough people to come from out of province, but to get them to stay here,” Hansman said.

In June the union filed a grievance with the province saying the teacher shortage was causing undue and continued disruption and wanted the province to take more action to hire teachers. The grievance came about six months after a special provincial task force released a report recommending new recruitment strategies, a fund to help retain teachers and an increase in the number of people graduating from teaching programs.

Now, less than a week before the new school year, Education Minister Rob Fleming maintains the shortage is being adequately addressed.

“In about 80 per cent of the cases, school districts are reporting that they have not had difficulty filling positions for the upcoming school year,” he said, adding that areas of difficulty in hiring include French immersion teachers, and high school science and math teachers.

The province has also funded more than 100 additional post secondary teacher training spaces, he said.

Last year at the peak of the shortage, some special education teachers were called on to take on a classroom full of students until a regular full-time teacher was hired, Hansman explained, and he worries this will continue through the coming year.

Fleming explained a number of teachers who had been substitute teachers were also hired into full-time positions, creating a smaller pool of teachers on call. The lack of substitute teachers meant that when regular teachers called in sick, sometimes special education teachers had to fill in because there weren’t any substitutes available.

According to Fleming, this year there are more substitute teachers available, and the Vancouver district has more than 200 extra teachers on call than it did last year.

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Hansman maintains that there are still too many vacant positions.

“It’s not OK, this is no way to run a system,” he said, adding “the most obvious thing is that there needs to be a market adjustment for starting wages for teachers.”

B.C.’s starting wage for teachers is one of the lowest in Canada. Compared to Alberta, where some school districts start at about $59,000 per year, B.C. teachers pull in approximately $47,000 in their first year.

Correction — Sept. 4. 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Deneka Michaud is the communications manager of Chilliwack school district. In fact, Michaud is the communications manager of the North Vancouver school district.

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