Sask. mother of 3 children with complex needs says teachers need more support in the classroom

Classroom size and complexity continue to be major sticking points in the ongoing impasse on a new teacher's contract in Saskatchewan.

One Regina mother says her children and others deserve to have heightened needs addressed.

Sarah Hennessey is the mother of three kids — aged five, eight and 11 — who attend Walker Elementary School, and says all three have some form of complex needs.

"My kids are in love with their school," she said, noting that her children deal with issues including anxiety and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. "Their teachers are fantastic."

Hennessey said teachers have encouraged her children to take breaks, bought fidget toys for them and made other accommodations for them to learn, but that there's increasing pressure on them to do those things without an educational assistant in the classroom.

"I know that there's so much pressure on the teachers to be all these things for the kids, and they don't have the training to be occupational therapists or psychologists or speech pathologists, right?" she said.

She said her youngest son has speech delays but has not been able to see a speech pathologist within the school system due to others' more pressing needs, while her middle child is on a two-year waitlist to get assessed for autism.

"I do definitely feel the lack of those specific supports for the kids."

WATCH | Mother of 3 children with complex needs says teachers need more support: 

Mother of 3 with complex needs says teachers need more support in the classroom

10 months ago

Duration 2:41

As teacher contract negotiations reach a stalemate in Saskatchewan, some parents are frustrated with being stuck in the middle. For one Regina mom with three children who have complex needs, it's been an emotional week. She says teachers and students need help.

Hennessey said her daughter had a particularly hard, unexpected experience in September when a teacher died in front of the class.

"That was a really traumatic experience obviously," she said.

Hennessey said her daughter benefited from therapy offered in the wake of that experience, but that it would be good for the children to have longer-term support at the school.

"They have a counsellor at the school but he's there one day a week, and has to see the entire school's worth of kids who have mental health problems," she said. "Mental health problems are a rising issue and it's not going away." 

LISTEN | Blue Sky looks at what we mean when we talk about "complex classrooms":

Blue Sky49:15What are we talking about when we say "complex classroom"?

Teachers walked off the job, again today. Today we dug into one of the main issues being brought forward in this labour dispute - Class size and complexity. We heard from parents of children with complex needs, teachers, and a retired speech language pathologist about what these types of specialized additional supports mean for students and teachers.

Some 13,000 teachers in Saskatchewan have gone on strike twice during the past week. Their union says it's because the government is refusing to negotiate on classroom size and complexity during contract talks.

The Ministry of Education said in a statement on Monday it is disappointed by the strikes and has said that class size and complexity issues are best addressed at the school division level, not in the collective agreement. 

"The place for determining solutions for those issues is not at the bargaining table," Education Minister Jeremy Cockrill told host Leisha Grebinski in an interview with CBC Radio's Blue Sky last week.

The Ministry of Education also said it's addressing the teachers concerns with $53.1 million in government spending on enrolment and complexity, a teacher-led innovation and support fund and specialized support classroom pilot projects. 

Earlier this month, Saskatchewan announced a $3.6-million pilot program to bring in specialized support classrooms to eight urban school divisions. The program is meant to de-escalate disruptive behaviour in schools, and is set to run from February of this year to the end of the 2024-25 school year.

Each of these special classrooms will have capacity for 15 students and will be staffed by a minimum of one teacher and two educational assistants. They'll also be able to use other support systems, such as psychologists and counselors, as needed, according to the province.

Regina teacher Andrew Gerrand said targeted, supported classrooms can have success. He works in a functional transition classroom in Regina, which serves kids with multiple complex needs that make it difficult for them to learn in a traditional class. His class serves seven or eight kids, and is staffed by Gerrand and two educational assistants. 

"Our ultimate goal is to make school a place students want to be and want to come every day," he said on Blue Sky.

He said that the scale of the project and the timeline is not enough to deal with the oversized and complex classrooms teachers are dealing with right now. 

"The longer it takes for us to be able to reach those students and provide them with the support that they need, the more challenging it's going to be as time persists to get those students … on a proper trajectory in order for them to be successful at school," he said. 

Hennessey said that, as a parent, she wants to see dedicated teachers' aides in every classroom, more counselling supports, budgets for tools such as fidgets, inclusive activities and more support for immigrant students still learning English. 

"It's frustrating that the government only wants to focus on wages," she said.

"Whether you think that teachers are asking for too much or not, the fact that they won't even bargain on these other factors or talk about them as part of the process is personally infuriating and painful, because this is my kids' life and future."