MONTREAL — Lately, Karine Boudreau has been thinking about quitting. During her 18-year career as a school psychologist, the thought of doing something else never crossed her mind.
But over the last four years, she felt she was unable to do justice to the students.
“It’s harder to find satisfaction in my job. The workload has increased a lot,” she said. “Should I continue? Will I be able to reach the end of my career in this environment? I’m thinking about it.”
As schools across Quebec begin to reopen next week, the province is struggling with a persistent staff shortage: more than 3,800 teaching positions remained vacant as of Wednesday.
But it’s not just teachers who are hard to find. Special education teachers, kindergarten teachers, psychologists and speech therapists are in short supply. And while the Quebec government insists it is taking steps to improve the situation, teachers and their unions say the problem will not be solved until schools are again seen as attractive places to work.
This year, Boudreau will be serving at two high schools in Drummondville, Quebec, a city of about 80,000 people between Montreal and Quebec City. One of the schools has not had access to a school psychologist for the past three years. She will only be there one day a week and worries she will not be able to meet students’ needs, which can range from anxiety and eating disorders to learning disabilities and autism.
That’s a big difference from when she started nearly 20 years ago. Back then, she says, she was able to work five days a week at a single school. Today, the elementary school psychologists on her panel often cover six or seven schools.
Boudreau said the student population at Drummondville has grown over the years, partly due to immigration, but the number of support staff has not kept pace. The result, she said, is that the most urgent cases are being treated and students with less urgent needs end up on waiting lists, sometimes for several months.
“As a professional, I don’t feel like I’m being effective … or doing everything I could or would like to do,” she said.
Boudreau is not alone. Jacques Landry, president of the Quebec Association of Education Professionals, said a survey last year found that 40 percent of professionals in the education system – including psychologists, counselors and speech therapists – were considering leaving. “That’s huge,” he said.
Landry estimates there are 1,500 to 2,000 unfilled specialist positions across the province as the school year begins. The School Support Personnel Association says there are another 3,450 vacancies for school daycare workers and more than 1,200 unfilled positions for special education technicians.
Add to that the 3,800 teaching positions that Education Minister Bernard Drainville said remain unfilled on Wednesday. Drainville said the influx of 20,000 new students into the province’s schools in the fall, partly due to immigration, has put even more strain on the system. “The goal is to have a teacher in every grade at the start of the school year,” he said.
The province has turned to non-law-certified teachers to fill the gaps, and there is now a 30-credit fast-track program to certify new teachers more quickly. Drainville has not said how many non-law-certified teachers will be in classrooms this year.
Jonathan Keane, an art teacher at Beaconsfield High School on the island of Montreal, said he has worked at some schools that were unable to fill their teaching positions for the entire school year, so they ended up having a “rotation mode” between different teachers in the same class. He also said it was common for full-time teachers to fill in for sick colleagues because replacements could not be found.
“It’s hard on students because they lack consistency,” he said. “They go to class and they don’t know who’s going to be there and they don’t know what’s going on.”
Keane, who has been teaching for 13 years, said when he started, teachers took any job they could find. Now, things are different. Of the 20 graduates from his class, he said, he knows of only three who are still teaching.
If the government wants to solve the teacher shortage, Keane said, teachers need to be paid better and their working conditions need to be improved. “You have to be a very special person to want to be a teacher,” he said. “But you know, these people are out there and we see that they are coming and don’t want to stay.”
Last winter, around 800 schools in Quebec were closed after a four-week teachers’ strike. In the end, a collective agreement was signed that provides for a 17.4 percent pay increase over a five-year period. Nicolas Prévost, president of the Quebec Association of Educational Institutions, said the agreement will make the teaching profession more attractive – in the long term.
“We won’t see the effects of this in the short term,” he said. “We’ll see them in three or four years.”
Currently, Prévost said, even head teachers can sit in classrooms and cover for sick teachers. In some schools, almost half of the staff are not legally qualified, Prévost said, and they are often not properly supervised. “They need support and we have difficulty giving it to them,” he said. “This certainly has an impact on the services offered to students.”
Back in Drummondville, Boudreau said she always loved working in the school system and never wanted to go anywhere else. But now she’s not so sure. “It’s less satisfying,” she said. “I admit I sometimes struggle to find that spark.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published August 22, 2024.
Maura Forrest, The Canadian Press
