GregMercer.ca Newspapering and other adventures

When is retirement not retirement?

Guelph Mercury, 04/21/10

A police officer doesn’t keep chasing bad guys after he leaves the service. The post man doesn’t keep delivering your mail once he hands in his mailbag. So why does no one blink when school teachers retire, and keep on working?

For years, the practice of retired teachers taking supply positions has been as normal as budget cuts and fundraisers at school boards in Ontario. But we’re not talking about taking a few supply days here and there – we’re talking about retired teachers accepting long-term supply contracts on top of pulling in their pensions.

On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you want to pad your retirement income, that’s your business. The problem, though, is that a retired supply teacher costs school boards about twice as much as a new teacher, and takes away another job opportunity for Ontario’s oversupply of teaching graduates.

A report by the Globe and Mail this week put in concrete terms what has been common practice in schools for too long. The newspaper found the province’s 10 largest school boards would have saved $16.7 million last year if they had hired recently certified teachers instead of retired teachers for supply work.

That practice leaves new teachers struggling to get the job experience they need to land a coveted full-time gig. They’ve been saying for years it’s time their retired counterparts to act like they’re retired and put down the chalk, but it seems no one has been listening.

Because union pay scales are based on years of service, some retirees are paid twice as much for a day’s supply work than a new teacher. I understand that principals and schools want teachers with experience, but favouring retired teachers over recent grads with no regard for the cost – when so many boards are strapped for cash – looks like cronyism. Kids, meanwhile, are cheated out of the new energy brought to the classroom by young, recently certified teachers.

The rules that allow teachers to work up to 95 supply days in the first three years after they retire is a leftover from the old days of Ontario’s teacher shortages. Today, the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that there are so few openings for teachers that some grads wait years to get a job.

Until then, they have to make due with the scraps left behind by older teachers who are allegedly retired. Understandably, they’re frustrated.

The Ontario College of Teachers’ manager of human resources says the province is producing 7,500 more new teachers each year than there are retirements. No wonder young people with education degrees are packing up their suitcases and teaching English in places like Korea, knowing it’ll be years before more teaching jobs start opening up here.

To help reduce the supply, Ontario has told its universities to cut as many as 1,000 openings from their teaching programs in the next few years. That will help reduce the supply problem, in a province where there’s two graduates for every teaching job.

And now the government says it’s looking at fixing the rules around how many supply days a teacher can work once they retire. Good. But the bigger question is this – why did it take a series of embarrassing stories in the national press before the province and its teachers union vowed to do something?

In the meantime, school boards can start being proactive on the issue. They can start hiring more young teachers as supply instructors, and they can start doing it today.

Greg Mercer is a Guelph-based writer. His column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at greg_mercer@hotmail.com, and past columns can be read at gregmercer.ca

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