From the papers...

Teachers face an uncertain future; Cycle of layoffs and rehiring starts again at the end of June, The Daily News (Nanaimo) Wed Jun 10 2009. Robert Barron (excerpts)

More than 260 of nearly 1,000 teachers currently working in the Nanaimo-Ladysmith school district have no idea where, or if, they will work this fall.

There are 107 teachers working under temporary contracts (expiring on June 30) and 161 more are being laid off due to complicated wording in their collective agreement.

Drafted in 1990, before declining enrolment started to affect the district, the agreement stipulates that teachers with less than four years and two months seniority lose their jobs at the end of the school year to allow positions to be opened up for full-time staff returning from leave.

While most of the laid-off teachers will be rehired, there's no guarantee that they will return to the same school or know what subjects they will teach.

Kip Wood, president of the Nanaimo District Teachers' Association, …. hopes ongoing discussions with the district might yield a better system.

Donna Allen, chairwoman of the district's board of trustees, agreed that the layoff and recall process doesn't work well and needs improvement.
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Wood said most of the laid-off teachers should be informed of their new postings in the first two weeks of July, but some won't know their status until the last weeks in August when school staffing levels are finalized, meaning an unsettled summer for many instructors.
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Schwazenegger pushes digital textbook in California, English News Service Tue Jun 9 2009 (excerpts)

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday visited a high school in the state to introduce digital textbooks, which would enable the students not to carry heavy textbooks to school.

The governor launched an initiative in May to make California the first state in the United States to offer schools free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students.

"Kids are very familiar listening to music digitally online,"
Schwarzenegger said, listing some social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
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"Textbooks are outdated as far as I'm concerned. How can kids be competitive in this economy when textbooks are stale and outdated?
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The state education department and educators also will determine whether free educational materials already on the Internet are suitable for school use.

The use of digital textbooks at schools is one way to reduce expenses as California is facing a huge budget deficit. An average traditional textbook costs about 75 to 100 U.S. dollars, but a digital textbook is much cheaper, and many of them are even free, reports said. A digital book reader can hold about 200 books.

It is estimated that for a school district with about 10,000 high school students, the use of free digital textbooks in just science and math classes could save up to 2 million dollars.
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Big and bloated are words that come to mind, The Province Thu Jun 11 2009
Michael Smyth (excerpts)

For a cabinet that's supposed to cut the fat out of government, you'd think Premier Gordon Campbell would have led by example yesterday and unveiled a lean, mean A-Team to get the job done.

Instead, Campbell appointed a fatter cabinet -- the club went from
22 members to 24 -- in a hotly anticipated shuffle. He also appointed half-a-dozen "parliamentary secretaries" -- a backbencher perk Campbell used to sneer at -- who each bag nearly $15,000 a year in bonus bucks for doing little work.

By swelling the size of the cabinet ranks by nine per cent, Campbell loaded more costs on to the shoulders of weary taxpayers who will soon be walloped by government service cuts. Every cabinet minister gets a big car, a big office, a big staff and a big travel budget.

This from the same guy who once bragged he could run the province with 12 cabinet ministers. This from the same guy who went completely ballistic when then-NDP-premier Glen Clark added four ministers to his cabinet, for a total of just 19.

"Taxpayers are getting soaked for a bigger cabinet!" Campbell railed back then. If 19 was a soaking, then I guess 24 is a completely water-logged saturation.

The bitter irony here is this fatter cabinet will be charged with cutting nearly $2 billion in spending out of the budget. The recession-driven belt-tightening is already causing pain. The government even pulled the funding for a van that cruised Vancouver streets at night to protect sex-trade workers.
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…. Falcon as health minister? …. I suspect this appointment indicates big changes are coming to the ministry -- like the possible amalgamation of health authorities.

One more gripe: Six ministers from Vancouver? That's a quarter of the whole cabinet. So much for Campbell's love affair with the "heartlands."

School boards get two-month reprieve; Province gives budget extensions to rework teacher salary funding, Edmonton Journal Thu Jun 11 2009. Sarah O'Donnell
(excerpts)

Alberta's education minister is giving school boards an extra two months to approve their budgets for the coming school year.

Dave Hancock issued the extension last week as the province continues to wrestle over the budget for teachers' salaries in the coming year.

The teachers' union agreed to a five-year contract in 2007 that awarded teachers an annual pay increase every September, based on Statistics Canada's calculation of Albertans' average weekly earnings over the previous year.

Earlier this year, it appeared teachers would receive a 4.8-per-cent increase based on that calculation.

In March --after the provincial budget was tabled, but before it was approved -- Statistics Canada altered its formula, reporting in a 5.99-per-cent increase in Albertans' average weekly wages the previous year.

That left Alberta Education and school boards that depend on provincial funding $23 million short.
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