Thirty members of the School District of Mystery Lake (SDML) clerical and support staff chose to be laid off due to operational changes resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic school closures, the board of trustees heard at a meeting broadcast via the district’s Facebook page April 21.
“We had offered what we referred to as an alternative layoff that went out to clerical staff as well as educational assistants,” superintendent of human resources and policy Angele Bartlett said in response to a question from board chair Don Macdonald about the effects of pandemic precautions on staffing levels. “We had 30 people opt for the alternative layoff.”
With classroom learning suspended, some district staff who primarily dealt with students, such as educational assistants, have had their work duties change and some opted for the layoff rather than working in other roles. Others could not continue working as they had due to childcare issues or immune system deficiencies that put them at greater risk of contracting the novel coronavirus.
“Some of them [who have been repurposed into different roles] are going and delivering work packages to homes of people, like paperwork for some of the kids that don’t have the technology for teachers to be able to scan the materials, so they were dropping work packages off and picking up work packages,” said Bartlett. “Some of the educational assistants were tasked with trying to clean out some of the desks and the lockers and supplies for students, bag them up, tag their names on them so parents could come and pick them up. These are really tasks that are not within their present job description. We also did a little bit of crossing over with the two unions. For example, if we had someone in the clerical union who had some experience in the past doing custodial work they very well could have been repurposed on the custodial side. We literally were trying to do everything we possibly could to find meaningful work to keep people employed.”
The suspension of classroom learning and the provincial government attempting to save money to be redirected towards health care will also have impacts on the district’s finances.
“The province has mandated that all expenditures cease except for those that are directly related to in-home remote student learning,” said secretary-treasurer Kelly Knott. “We’re working on the fiscal and workforce sustainability exercise that the province has issued. Included in that is the 15 per cent reduction of executive and managerial costs that were announced many months ago through the budget process. We are looking at deferring non-essential expenses. We’re in the middle of identifying those at this time.”
Bartlett also told the board about four teachers who have submitted their resignations effective June 30. Two have been employed by SDML since 2018, another since 2015 and the third since 2012.
