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BRITISH COLUMBIA

City urged to put
brakes on plans
to sell VSB land

At last the real reason why Education
Minister Jack Heinrich kicked out the
elected Vancouver school board and put his
personal political puppet, Allan Stables, in
charge has come out.

It wasn’t only that the COPE majority on
the school board was a thorn in the educa-
tion minister’s side, preventing him from
implementing cuts in the Vancouver school
budget — it.was the fact that he wanted to
sell Vancouver’s temporarily unused schools
to private interests and use the money to
finance what is left of our public school
system. This is now made clear by Stables’
admission that he wants to raise $20 million
-_ byselling Vancouver’s schools. That means
a $20 million savings for his masters in Vic-
toria, but the saving is at our expense.

These schools and the grounds on which
they are located are public property. They
were never intended to be “privatized” by
anyone..

\

And former NPA school trustee Jona-
than Baker, an ardent supporter of the
Socreds, dutifully sang the same tune with
his statement that “the city hall wing of
COPE (is) going to bat for the deposed
school board trustees.”

Heinrich even threatens to take legal
action if city council should dare to rezone
school land for public use and defeat his
plans for selling them off to private interests.
How’s that for arrogance? :

Incidentally, if council decides to rezone,
that means public hearings must be held
where any group and any citizen affected
may make his or her views known. That’s
more than Heinrich or Stables were pre-
pared to do — they wanted to sell them off
without any public Sonsultation what-
soever.

SEAN GRIFFIN

TRIBUNE PHOTO

Author Ben Swankey (r) autographs copies of his new book The Tory Budget
for Geoff and Jill Keighley at a special book-launching Sept. 19. The book,

which is already enjoying brisk sales, retails for $6 and is available from
People’s Co-op Bookstore or direct from the pUbyehen 7 the Centre for Socialist

Education.

COPE picks trustee candidates

They should not be privatized for several
sound reasons. One is that there could be
another baby boom or influx of people with
children into a neighborhood.

If these schools are sold we would have to
build new ones and today’s building costs
are astronomical. Even finding a suitable
amount of property and a location may be
impossible. It would mean a big increase in
school taxes. If we don’t need these build-
ings for the time being as schools, they can
be used as community centres for any.
number of activities — for sports, for
seniors and so on.

_ Finally, the grounds could be used as
parks and sports facilities. The main thing is
that these buildings and the land should

force an election in Vancouver this fall. Sev-
eral other tasks need volunteers, COPE
officials said, for that campaign and election ~
effort.

In a related development, Dominique
Roelants, former vice-chair of the Cowi-
chan School board, predicted the Socreds
would cancel normally scheduled elections
for the district Nov. 16. }

Roelants, fired along with the other eight ;
trustees for rejecting the government’s cut-
backs, said it would be “‘a major embar-—
rassment for the Social Credit government —
if, as everyone expects, the people who —
voted against compliance were re-elected.” —

couver and Cowichan, and an end to the
Socreds’ restraint program in education.

“T believe it is possible now for the minis-
ter to feel public pressure and call an elec-
tion,” he said.

Wes Knapp, a COPE trustee = 1980
to 1984, said the aim of the government’s ~
education cutbacks, which will extend into
the 1986-87 school year, is to reduce
teachers’ jobs and increase the pupil-teacher
ratio to 1975 levels.

Vancouver COPE Ald. Bruce Yorke cau-
tioned that if the government is unopposed
over its school board firing, “The question

‘will be raised: ‘Why have elected school
boards, period?’

“We are in tune with the sentiments of
the vast majority of the people. Once we’ve
started the process, it will gain tremendous
momentum,” he stated.

COPE is looking for volunteers to hand
out leaflets next month in the campaign to

Committee of Progressive Electors
members unanimously endorsed nine can-
didates for the Vancouver school board,
and pledged to wage a campaign to force
the education minister to call school board
elections this fall.

Endorsed to carry COPE’s banner are
the five COPE trustees fired for refusing to
implement provincial government cutbacks
to the Vancouver school system last May:
Pauline Weinstein, Phil Rankin, Gary
Onstad, John Church and Carmela Alle-
vato.

Joining them on the campaign are Cha-
rles Ungerleider, Sadie Kuehn, Bill Darnell
and Chris Allnutt.

Rankin told the COPE members,
gathered in the Russian People’s Hall on
‘Sunday, that there is a widespread demand
among parents and the public for auto-
nomous, locally-elected school boards, an
end to the imposed trusteeships in Van-

Pay cuts spark teacher boycott

If there were no elections in Vancouver or —
Cowichan before the next provincial elec-
tion (anticipated next spring) and the —
Socreds were re-elected, Roelants predicted —
that all elected boards in B.C. would be
abolished. .

- remain in public hands, not sold to some
private developer, who would naturally

of economy is as false as it is immoral. A

Expo 86 party, and $12 million just to

_ The proposal is coming to council from
~ council’s

have the ear of the provincial cabinet, to
build an apartment or pub.

The idea that publicly-owned schools
and lands should be kept for public use is-
_ not new — it’s a concept that the public
_ supports. Even the Vancouver Sun and Pro-
vince accept and support this.

_ For the Social Credit government to
claim that this must be done on the grounds

4 government that can spend $500,000 for an

advertise Expo in the U.S. — which is
spending money like water on Expo —
_ certainly can’t claim any shortage of funds.

Vancouver city council is now consider-
ing a proposal to rezone the schools so they
can’t be sold out from under the feet of
- Vancouver citizens by puppet Stables. That
~ makes Education Minister Heinrich mad.

planning committee, where it
received unanimous support. It had
been discussed in the city’s planning com-
_. mission as far back as 1983, because it
_ seemed a sensible thing to do — to rezone
_ school property for public use.

_ Heinrich, without bothering much to
look at the facts, which apparently don’t
interest him, accused council. of being
“arrogant and arbitrary” for a decision it
hasn’t even made. He made the further silly
statement that “the left-wing majority on
council are coming and looking after their —
farm club (presumably meaning the elected
school which he arrogantly and arbitrarily

d ‘).”

An attack on the decades-old practice
of paying wage increments based on expe-
rience to B.C.’s junior teachers has raised
teachers’ ire like no other issue, B.C.
Teachers Federation officials say.

Teachers in nine districts — initially it
was 17 — have been denied their yearly
increments, established more than 50
years ago.

The refusal of school boards or arbitra-
tors to implement the increments consti-

tutes a “double whammy for teachers”.

who in most cases have received zero wage
hikes during the past two years, said
BCTF bargaining committee member
George North.

In six of the nine remaining districts,
teachers have declared off-limits extracur-
ricular activities and other volunteer tasks
to protest the cutoff of the increments.

“This is an issue that has stirred up the
fight in teachers like no other issue has,”
said bargaining division member Wes
Knapp.

The problem arose when trustees in the
17 districts either claimed inability to pay
the increments, or won arbitration cases
with that argument. Some of the arbitra-
tion rulings have been backed by compen-
sation stabilization commissioner Ed
Peck.

“Essentially, Peck has equivocated on
the whole bloody thing,” by accepting
arbitrators’ or trustees’ argument that the
increments, which are not included in

yearly collective agreement negotiations,

fall under the scope of the hotly contested,
‘Curtis edict’,” said Knapp.

The term refers to Socred Finance Min-
ister Hugh Curtis’ ruling last April deny-
ing salary increases for the province’s
23,000 teachers.

The BCTF points out that the incre-
ments, first established in the mid-1930s,
are owed teachers who took a lower-than-
usual salary for the first 10 to 12 years of
their teaching careers.

’ Federation public relations officer
Arnie Myers explained that the system
came into effect to help save boards
money during times when districts had to
hire several teachers simultaneously,
straining the reach of the districts’ budgets.

During the first 10 to 12 years —
depending on the district — the newer
teachers are paid the yearly increments as
recognition of the experience gained inthe
teaching field.

“In trade union language, you’d call it
their ‘apprentice’ period,” said Myers. “It
amounts to a fairly small amount of the
total salary bill, probably in the neighbor-
hood of .5 per cent.”

In Vancouver, teachers-were granted

only half their usual increments by Allan
Stables, the trustee appointed by Educa-
tion Minister Jack Heinrich following the
provincial government’s firing of the nine-
member Vancouver school board last
spring.

The sometimes termed “work to rule”

campaign was struck after meetings
among the presidents of the teachers asso-
ciations in the affected districts, during the
August BCTF summer conference.

The campaign also involves requesting }|-
teachers associations in neighboring dis- ‘]
tricts to refuse participation in extracur-
ricular activities involving locals where the
payments were withheld, wrote North in |
the September issue of the BCTF Newslet- |
ter. :
Districts still paying no. increments
include Vancouver, Grand Forks, Surrey,
Maple Ridge, Peace River North, Victoria,
Cowichan, Sooke and Qualicum. In Van-
couver Island North teachers and trustees
were expected to reach an agreement at
press time.

In Kitimat, Soreciient was reached
when the board agreed to pay increments
retroactive to June 30, avoiding the “Cur-

tis edict” which forbade increases in the
1985-86 school year.

In Surrey, where board chairman Hollis
Kelly recently resigned over the govern-
ment’s continuéd cutbacks to education,
teachers voted for the boycott following
denial of increments owed approximately
half the teaching staff.

Calling the denial of increments: *
salary cut for teachers not at maximum,”
Surrey Teachers Association president
Brian Porter told associations the cutoffs
were ‘being used as ‘‘an ill-concealed
carrot-club inducment to abandon
demands for a justifiable salary increase.”

2 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, SEPTEMBER 25, 1985