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Union president still seeking apology from school board chair

A union president is still after Jay Aspin, the chair of the Near North District School Board, for a letter of apology after a trustee leaked surplus numbers of elementary teachers who could be laid off to the media.

Rob Hammond, the President of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario, has asked Aspin for the apology, but more than two weeks after the incident happened, Hammond says he still doesn’t have a letter.

Hammond says under the collective agreement, the school board has to issue surplus or redundancy notices to the teachers’ federation by April 15 which he says it did. Hammond says the federation doesn’t make the numbers public.

He says it’s up to the school board to notify each of the affected teachers once the board gets its funding from the province and knows exactly how many teachers, if any, need to be laid off. The board is still waiting for the funding allocation so the school board hasn’t talked to any of the teachers facing potential layoffs.

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Hammond says the board has until May 31st to send out letters of redundancy to affected teachers. Hammond says because the school board doesn’t have its funding yet for the next school year, the numbers it gave the federation were an estimate.

In this instance, Hammond says the redundancy notices number 88 out of 472 teaching positions. Hammond says once the affected teachers are informed, then the Federation talks to them and work on ways to see how they can get them back into the teaching profession.

Hammond says prior to the surplus notices being leaked to the North Bay Nugget, a very small number of people knew the actual number. “When I asked the Nugget where they got the number from they said it was a very reliable source and they would not have published it had not been reliable,” he said.

“So I was very quickly able to nail it down it was none of my members. It could only have come from the board and it came from a board meeting.”

Hammond says in a discussion he had with Jackie Young, the Education Director, “she had been carefully coveting those numbers and making sure they were not released by the board.” “Did it come from the board, I doubt it,” he said.

“It probably came from one of the trustees. Why did it come from them, I don’t know.”

Hammond applauded Young for talking to the teachers after the numbers were leaked. He says the membership is “extremely upset” over the leak. Hammond says it’s a terrible and terrifying experience to learn you may be losing your job through the media as opposed to your employer telling you first.

Hammond says what’s happened is very unprofessional and forms the basis for why the union wants that letter of apology from Aspin because as chair, the buck stops with him.

“He’s communicating this information to the public, he’s accountable for it and he’s the chairman of the school board,” he said.

Hammond says Aspin may not owe the media an apology over the leak but as chair he certainly owes the elementary teachers of the Near North board one. He says that the letter needs to explain why the numbers were given to the media “before our members were informed”.

MyParrySoundNow.com has reached out to Aspin twice leaving messages on his phone asking for an interview on the issue, but he has not returned our call.

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