Teacher Deal Reached?

B.C. students could be headed back to school as early as next week, four weeks after classes were scheduled to begin for the fall semester, with the provincial teachers' union announcing it has reached a tentative deal with its employer.

Media were notified of the deal by a 3:50 a.m. tweet from the BC Teachers' Federation, and the announcement was later confirmed by mediator Vince Ready.

"I'm very pleased to announce that the parties have reached a tentative agreement. I'm not at liberty to release any of the details, nor are the parties," Ready said to media outside the Richmond hotel where both sides had been meeting since Friday, in a video posted to CBC.ca.

"The parties are going to meet later this morning and finalize any of the outstanding details."

The voicemail message for BCTF spokesperson Rich Overgaard also confirmed the tentative deal, adding media will receive a press release later today about when union president Jim Iker will be available to speak to the agreement details.

An early morning tweet from the union's communications director Nancy Knickerbocker indicates that teachers will vote on the deal as early as Thursday, Sept. 18, after which school support staff will need to prepare schools for reopening.

A Ministry of Education spokesperson told The Tyee to "stand by" for an announcement about more details and Minister Peter Fassbender's availability later today.

Districts won't get September strike savings

Vancouver School Board Chair Patti Bacchus, who was notified about the deal by an early morning phone call, hopes the school board can vote to ratify the deal as early as tomorrow night. If teachers follow suit on Thursday, schools could be open as early as next week.

"Once we get the indication from [the employers' association] that all districts have ratified, we'd like to get schools open as soon as we can," she said. "If I had to guess I'd say Monday, but we haven't nailed it down for sure."

The province has allowed school districts to keep 20 per cent of money saved because of the strike, as far back as June. But the districts were told late Friday that the province would take back the September share of savings.

"We received a letter last Friday afternoon at 5:03 p.m. from the assistant deputy minister of education advising us that the ministry would be claiming all September savings from the strike," she said, adding no reason was given.

"If you save money on supplies, utilities, or facility use, they want every single thing accounted for and they will be reclaiming all of it," Bacchus said.

Vancouver, which cancelled its summer school program, lost revenue from building rentals and lost $300,000 in revenue from 26 international students who decided not to attend Vancouver schools this year -- a loss Bacchus expects will increase since students aren't obliged to tell the district they aren't coming. She said the board will have to use the $3 million in funding left over from spring budgeting to cover the losses.

Last spring, the district predicted a budget shortfall of $11.65 million for the 2014/15 school year, but managed to make enough cuts to balance the budget.

Students, however, should expect to have a full school year despite losing over 10 days of school so far.

"In the past, the general consensus has been that two weeks could be lost and [students would] still be okay in terms of outcomes," she said, referencing a Labour Relations Board ruling on education as an essential service.

Bacchus, who participated in a conference call with the employers' association this morning about the deal but would not divulge details, said she asked about making up for lost learning time by rescheduling the school year, but said it's an issue for the ministry to decide.

Surprise deal

If passed, this will be the fourth negotiated settlement reached between the teachers' union and government since provincial bargaining was introduced in 1994.

A 1998 legislated agreement between the BCTF and then New Democratic Party government was the result of teachers bargaining directly with government. Because the government bypassed the employers' association, its education bargaining arm, the agreement could not be ratified without government legislation.

Today's news comes as somewhat of a surprise considering how far apart the two sides were last week. On Sept. 10, teachers voted 99.4 per cent in favour of ending their three-and-a-half month strike if government agreed to binding arbitration, where a third party would create a deal both sides would adhere to.

But the government, hesitant to agree when the union first broached the subject on Sept. 4, rejected the plan twice, before and again after the vote. The main reason was lack of control over the financial outcome, a situation the government faced once before in 2001 when the province's doctors reached a deal through binding arbitration. The government raised provincial sales taxes by 0.5 per cent and tobacco taxes by $8 on a carton of 200 cigarettes to cover the cost.

Instead, Minister Fassbender and Premier Christy Clark maintained mediated negotiations were the only method to reaching a negotiated settlement, saying teachers needed to reduce the cost of their bargaining demands to come into the "affordability zone" of the other 150,000 unionized public workers that had reached a deal.

Later in the week, however, both politicians hinted at legislating an agreement if one wasn't reached by the time the provincial legislature reopened on Oct. 6.