To the Editor,
I was pleased to hear that B.C. parents are considering a protest regarding the current political situation between the government and B.C. teachers.
My youngest child will graduate this year. A victim of Christy Clark’s vendetta against education in B.C., he has only known large class sizes, underfunded classrooms, with no texts or outdated worn ones.
My advocacy as a parent could be over. Yours should not. I have suggested for years that if parents were to protest cuts to education by keeping their children out of school for one week, and teachers were to go to school and face empty classrooms, the embarrassment to the government would be overwhelming.
Teachers have accepted zero per cent time and again, have paid their own funds to supplement education materials that are not provided, have paid their own funds to access professional development. We have walked picket lines and clearly that has not gotten the attention of Ms. Clark and her government. It is time, perhaps past time, that parents clearly made their voices heard.
Wendy deGrootkindergarten teacherNanaimo
To the Editor,
Before the premier finds her own convenient excuses why the system, as she calls it, is broken, the voters in our province need clarity. I think ‘broken’ means that the Liberal government hasn’t been able to bully the teachers into submission, the way they have done in the past to the hospital employees union or the the B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union. They ordered these other groups back to work and mandated contracts to them, including cutting nurses’ pay as a punishment for believing in a fair bargaining system.
Ms. Clark’s problem is that the teachers are sticking up for themselves and are tired of the education system being gutted by the government for so long now. We had enough of being bullied and were set for change, till the Liberal scare strategy worked and Clark brought us to where we are today.
I think there should be a provincewide work stoppage to show our thanks to teachers.
R. DouglasNanaimo
