Roughly 50 per cent of Calgary teachers are dealing with unmanageable stress in the workplace, according to an Alberta Teachers’ Association well-being survey.
The survey, which had more than 7,000 respondents, was sent to ATA Local 38 members in 2022 and again in 2024. Stephani Clements, president of ATA Local 38, said the percentage points did not change between those two years.
She said teachers are spending hours on government-mandated and school-directed assessments to collect data for school development plans and other frameworks, as well as keeping up with assignment-sharing expectations and learning the new curricula. Teachers are also spending extra time outside of their work hours to plan lessons, attend professional development courses and mark assignments.
“An elementary colleague was distraught when she couldn’t answer a question about a particular student’s receptive language skills after two months in her classroom. The teacher felt like she had failed her student,” Clements told the CBE’s board of trustees at a Tuesday board meeting.
“Another colleague looked around her Grade 7 classroom and realized she had not spoken to a particular student all week. Teachers are not able to meet the needs of their students.”
Clements’ comments come after the CBE released a report about employee treatment on Tuesday. The report found that the school district complies with all of its policies and indicators for providing employees with a “safe, courteous and professionally supportive” environment.
According to the report, a CBE well-being survey sent to all employees in April this year showed that managing workload, leadership and employee awareness remain of high importance. More than 94 per cent of those surveyed said employee benefits were also identified as being of “high value” and ranked it as a top resource in relation to well-being.
CBE well-being survey is limited: ATA
Joanne Pitman, CBE chief superintendent, said staff retention rates for the 2023-2024 school year after completing their probationary period were also high. More than 95 per cent of school-based principals and assistant principals who successfully passed their evaluation maintained their titles at their three-year anniversary in 2023-2024, the report said.
Pitman added that the CBE has policies and supports to help employees understand the supports that are available to them, which helps ensures a “safe organizational culture.”
“One of the ways that we look to continue to monitor improvement in this is to continue to monitor through our Education Plan and the measures that are identified within, specifically, as we look at a culture of well-being, where every employee can thrive with respect to their role and the opportunities before them,” she told trustees on Tuesday.
Clements, however, said the CBE’s well-being survey is limited because it is a single-topic survey and doesn’t address the complexities that teachers are dealing with. She told LiveWire Calgary while the CBE is making an effort to address staff well-being, teachers are dealing with overcrowded classrooms with not enough resources. Teachers are also dealing with an increasing population of students with complex needs, and the ones who are getting attention from their teacher are often the students who are struggling.
She added the need for constant data collection is “ridiculous” and called it the “data-ification of education.”
“You have a situation where all of these initiatives are being forced upon the board and forced upon teachers by the government because they feel like we need to capture all of this data, which is what we do anyway … But there seems to be zero trust that we’re doing that job,” Clements said.
“You’ve got a government who believes that you need to be accountable, which is because they want to count the things [that we do] as opposed to show and have the ability to respond saying, ‘These are the students, and this is where they are, and this is where we’re moving them forward.’”
Clements added that a better way to gauge employee well-being is by looking at how many teachers are on sick leave and how that number changed year over year.
“We have teachers who are declining full-time contracts to go back onto a sub roster because it’s manageable because being a teacher is unmanageable … No one signs up for six years of education to go into a classroom to collect data like we do it, because we love students and we want them to thrive and flourish and build those relationships and all of these other things are getting in the way of of our ability to do that,” she said.
“The basics are being in the room and actually getting to the curriculum and building those relationships so kids feel safe enough to make mistakes … I do really worry for our members, who are just barely holding on, and they’ve been holding on for a number of years.”
Clements urged parents to pay attention to the work their kids do and connect with teachers.
“Reach out, get interested, have conversations with them when you’re picking [your kids] up or send them an email,” she said.
“I know they’re busy and they’re overwhelmed, but they do want the best for all these kids who want them to do well.”
