By Arshy Mann

Teachers on ‘controlled strike’ required to provide marks for students applying to post-secondary institutions, scholarships

VANCOUVER (CUP) — Teachers in British Columbia may not be writing report cards this year, but graduating students should have no problem getting their grades to universities and colleges.
As part of an ongoing “controlled strike,” the B.C. Teachers Federation (BCTF) has, among other things, not been writing and distributing report cards to students. However, teachers will still be reporting the grades of graduating students to administration.
“There are three specific circumstances in which marks — and it’s marks, not report cards — must be provided, and that’s for applications for scholarship, for graduation, and for applications for post-secondary institutions,” said Deborah Stewart, media liaison for the B.C. Public School Employers’ Association (BCPSEA), which represents school districts and the provincial government in labour negotiations with teachers.
According to Stewart, if a student or parent requests marks for one of these three reasons, then the teacher must provide them to school administration, who will then forward it along to the Ministry of Education.
“In terms of the grade 12 stuff, it will be the administrator who will be facilitating getting that into the hands of students for university purposes, but we will be definitely supplying the marks,” said Glen Hansman, second vice president for the BCTF.
Hansman stressed that during this job action, teachers have continued all of their classroom duties and have only ceased administrative duties, such as attending staff meetings, doing paperwork, and running fundraisers.
“Teachers are still teaching. They’re still marking, assessing [and] doing all the things they normally do with students in their classrooms,” said Hansman. “In fact, we probably have more time to do those things with kids in classrooms because we’re not doing a lot of the administrative tasks that have increased over the past decade.”
The BCTF has also told all teachers to continue communicating with parents about students’ progress through a variety of means, such as telephone calls, emails, and meetings.
Post-secondary institutions also appear to not be worried that the job action will affect admissions for prospective students.
“We have mechanisms to get students [their] grades other than the report cards. Students can self-report their grades to us and then we verify what they self-report to us against official data that comes from the ministry in May,” said Andrew Arida, associate director of Enrolment Services at UBC.
He said that this is the university’s “standard operating procedure” and doesn’t anticipate any problems this year.
According to Patty Pitts, manager of media relations at the University of Victoria, the university has a similar self-reporting system as UBC and won’t be affected by the lack of report cards.
In 2005, a similar labour dispute between the BCTF and the provincial government escalated to a full strike, but the issue was resolved before marks had to be reported.
Hansman stated that despite what he characterized as a “frustrating” bargaining process, the BCTF isn’t expecting a similar escalation in action this year.
Arida said that it was too early to speculate about how universities would respond if a similar escalation were to occur, but said that in that case, admissions wouldn’t be the biggest worry.
“Frankly, I would be more concerned with students having to do first year university classes when they haven’t properly done the classes that may be prerequisites,” he said.