|
The Human Resources and Payroll Department provides a variety of services to all employees in the school board. There are approximately 4,300 employees board-wide. The department constantly seeks to improve its delivery of services to the schools and individual employees.
A new teachers’ collective agreement was enacted by the National Assembly on December 16th, 2005. This agreement is in effect until the spring of 2010. The spirit of the agreement is based on increased cooperation between teachers and in-school administrators to ensure student success. Every school now has in place a school level committee that makes recommendations to a Central Parity Committee concerning required resources and services for their special needs students.
The Central Parity Committee, made up of three people from senior management and three people from the Pearson Teachers Union, meets regularly to assess requests for additional resources from schools and to review school level committee plans on the distribution of resources.
Teachers
The recruitment of new teachers remains a top priority. This past March, more than 250 candidates were interviewed and assessed. Contracts were offered to our top candidates within weeks of the interviews and this enabled us to hire excellent candidates in key subject areas such as Mathematics and Science.
We have worked diligently in building stronger relationships with French universities and this has resulted in the placement of nine student teachers from French universities in our elementary schools for the 2006/2007 school year. This is an essential component in addressing our teacher needs at the elementary and secondary levels. This past year 468 student teachers were placed in our schools primarily from McGill University. We continue to benefit from an excellent relationship with the Department of Education at McGill.
Several workshops for new and second year teachers took place last year under the leadership of Jim MacKinnon. These workshops are invaluable in not only giving new teachers great tools for the classroom, but also in developing long term relationships with their peers.
Support Staff
Major School Change had a significant impact on several groups among the support staff. The union (Independent Association of Support Staff) and the Human Resources Department worked tirelessly in ensuring that all employees affected by Major School Change were dealt with fairly and equitably.
School Administrators
The Human Resources Department worked closely with school administrators in offering support in many areas including: service contracts; transactions forms; insurance information; hiring of teachers and support staff. Efforts were made during the past year to improve communication between Human Resources and school administrators, with a special emphasis placed on responding to requests in a timely manner.
School boards throughout Quebec continue to experience a shortage of applications for school administrative positions. We received more than twenty-five internal and external applications for administrative positions during the course of the school year.
The mentoring program for new administrators (first and second year), under the direction of Jim MacKinnon continues to flourish. This program offers workshops throughout the year for our new administrators. They also receive individual support on an ongoing basis from Jim MacKinnon, Sector Directors, and Human Resources.
Contract Negotiations
The 2005-2006 school year saw the beginning of local contract negotiations with three of our unionized employee groups: The Pearson Teachers Union; The Independent Union of Support Staff; and The Pearson Educational Professionals. These negotiations are continuing in 2006-2007 and are expected to be completed by December 2006.
|
