Toronto teachers get a new Collective Agreement!

City public high school teachers ratify deal; Union pleased with 4-year pact that gives them 12% hike and 'no significant changes', The Toronto Star, Fri Sep 11 2009. Kristin Rushowy

Toronto's public high school teachers have ratified a four-year contract with the board that allows principals to assign them to cover for absent colleagues if a substitute can't be found.

But what emerged as the key sticking point during negotiations - how much supervision teachers provide in hallways or cafeterias - remains the same, and is still by far the lowest amount of time in the province.
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Doug Jolliffe, president of District 12 of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation, said 98 per cent of members supported the deal, which also provides a 12.55 per cent wage increase over the next four years, as provided by the provincial government.

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"It was not an unreasonable request on the part of the board," for principals to call on teachers to fill in for a colleague's full-day absence if a substitute isn't available, Jolliffe said.

The union said all along it would not agree to any "strips," or clawbacks, to supervision. Its members do the lowest amount of supervision anywhere in Ontario.
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Toronto teachers can do 37 supervision blocks of roughly 40 minutes each, per school year, monitoring hallways or computer rooms or filling in for colleagues who are absent for part of the day. But because of restrictions written into past agreements, they only end up doing about 12.

In the past, principals and vice-principals have had to cover the classes, taking them away from administrative duties also creating safety concerns, Campbell said.