When 12-year-old Sunny Olvr sits down to read a book, words don’t always make sense. Diagnosed with dyslexia, the Saskatoon student has been struggling to read despite his mother’s advocacy.
His mom Lindsay Olvr said teachers try to do their best but they don’t always have the right training or resources to support her son. Since Sunny’s diagnosis two years ago, she’s been playing catch-up, hiring tutors and navigating the school system.
“It’s been a very long, frustrating process,” she said. “Every spare waking moment, I was researching and reading and learning and figuring out the system and what he needed.”
Sunny goes to École Cardinal Leger Catholic School in Saskatoon. His school will be one of many across Saskatchewan getting a new kind of support — a dedicated “classroom complexity teacher.”
It was a key issue on the bargaining table when the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation (STF) was negotiating the latest collective agreement, with teachers arguing it should be part of their collective agreement and provincial negotiators saying it should not.
Following job action that included rotating strikes through the first half of 2024, the two sides agreed to put the issue to binding arbitration. In March, the arbitration board directed that classroom complexity should be part of the new contract, and in April, the two sides signed a new collective agreement that included terms regarding classroom complexity.
Now, as part of addressing classroom complexity, any school with more than 150 students will receive one full-time teacher whose role is to provide extra support to students with complex needs. Schools with 75 to 149 students will get a half-time position.
That framework results in roughly 500 new teaching positions under the new deal, along with a $20-million fund for additional supports.
“We have been experiencing the effects of increasing classroom complexity for awhile here in Saskatchewan,” STF president Samantha Becotte said. “It can’t fix all of the issues; it’s not going to be able to address everything.… It’s just a first step”
School divisions across the province say they’ve already filled most of the new positions. CBC reached out to some school divisions and they provided these numbers:
Mark Haarmann, director of education for Regina Public Schools, said the new positions come at a critical time.
“Kids are markedly different than they were even five years ago,” Haarmann said. “This additional staffing is a huge boon to that. It lets us deal with and support student needs in terms of classroom complexities and really lets us focus on giving kids the academic support they need.”
Unlike usual classroom teachers, complexity teachers won’t have their own class. Instead, they are meant to provide targeted support to students who need the extra help, help teachers support children, or help with behavioural and mental-health challenges of students.
The specific duties depend on the different needs of the schools.
“If it’s reading interventions or maybe numeracy or mathematics interventions that are needed to support students in their academic side, they can tailor the position to support those needs,” Becotte said.
Haarmann said Regina Public Schools’ model includes specialized classrooms in some schools, while others will have a single teacher offering support for the whole building.
However, he said one of the disadvantages is that a large urban high school like those in Regina and Saskatoon with thousands of students will still get one complex needs teacher, the same as a school with a much smaller population in rural areas or smaller towns.
“Down the road, it will be our hope that Regina Public Schools would get an allocation that better matches our enrolments and school sizes,” Haarmann said.
For parents like Olvr, the new complex needs positions offer some hope, but not enough.
“It would [help] if they had training in structured literacy, because he did get one-on-one support. He did get additional reading intervention. It just wasn’t with the resources that were helping him,” she said.
The province said in a statement that school divisions decide their own staffing needs. The new teachers’ deal funds additional hires to address classroom challenges, and the ministry will gather information about how many total positions have been filled this fall.
The STF also plans to monitor how many of the positions are filled this fall and how they are used. Becotte said they are keeping an eye on whether divisions can recruit and retain enough qualified teachers — particularly in rural and northern areas where shortages are common.
