By rdnewsNOW staff

Pushed back one month

Red Deer Public Schools defers educational assistant layoffs until June

Apr 1, 2020 | 4:54 PM

Red Deer Public Schools says it won’t be laying off its 258 educational assistants until June 1, a month later than first planned.

The district says there will also be no more assignments for substitute teachers and that contracted bussing services are suspended for the remainder of the school year. They are not anticipating further staffing reductions at this time.

In a media release Wednesday afternoon, the district says it’s losing $1.45 million from the province following Saturday’s announcement by Education Minister Adriana LaGrange that $128 million in K-12 funding is being cut province-wide and directed to Alberta’s COVID-19 pandemic response.

LaGrange said school support staff, including educational assistants, substitute teachers and bus drivers, would be laid off and left it to local school districts to implement the reductions.

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Red Deer Public says it looked at all aspects of its budget to maximize student learning in light of the cuts.

“We wanted to support continuity of learning as much as possible. Through overall cost savings through reduced operations within our schools and the division, we are now able to defer the layoffs to educational assistants until June 1 rather than May 1 as originally planned,” said Superintendent Stu Henry. “This will allow us to use educational assistants to maintain our plans to support learning from home, particularly in these early stages. We can also provide targeted support to students with special needs, including those PUF students in pre-kindergarten.”

Meantime, district officials say they’re pleased with how online learning for its 11,000 students has gone since starting last week.

“We received really great feedback after a week of learning from home. When we established our plans for continuity of learning, our educational assistants and support staff played an important role in the delivery,” said Henry. “Our top priority is to continue to provide great teaching and learning to our students while they are home.”

“We are incredibly proud of how staff in all of our schools have responded to these challenging times,” Buchanan added. “‘We’re in this together’ is the rallying cry for this pandemic crisis. Our support staff have played an important role throughout the school year and had really stepped up as we’ve responded to this unprecedented pandemic. While they still face layoffs June 1, fortunately we have been able to minimize the impact of this funding reduction to students and staff.”

(With file from media release)