A couple hundred elementary and high school students staged their own walkout Friday, leaving school early to rally in the pouring rain to support B.C. teachers, who plan to walk off their jobs Monday as part of a three-day strike.
Outside the downtown Vancouver Art Gallery, students took turns speaking into a megaphone and chanting.
Grade 8 student Sophie Perdriel held a sign above her head that read "Batman would help the teachers, why won't you? Teachers are our superheroes."
The 14-year-old, whose parents gave her permission to attend the rally, said she was there to support her math and English teachers.
"Teachers, they've been helping us through the years, they aren't getting the cut they need," she said.
"They work incredibly hard. Students are always complaining, 'Oh, we work a lot,' but when we look at our teachers, they work for hours.
"The government is just being unfair."
Teachers have been conducting job action since school started in September, refusing to do administrative tasks such as filling out report cards to back demands for a wage increase of 15 per cent and to protest government's refusal to budge from its commitment to negotiate public sector contracts that don't include cost increases.
Last week, a fact finder concluded the two sides are still too far apart despite a year of negotiations to hope for a negotiated settlement. The government announced it would order teachers back to their jobs.
That prompted teachers to apply to the Labour Relations Board on Monday for the right to strike and the government introduced its legislation Tuesday. A strike vote by teachers passed by 87 per cent and the teachers' union announced it would go ahead Monday with the three days of strike deemed appropriate by the labour board.
The government's house leader has said he has no plans to rush the back-to-work bill and it probably won't be passed into law until after next week.
The events of this week pushed up the volume on the strike, but on Friday, Education Minister George Abbott said the rhetoric had gone too far, at least in one case.
Abbott said he was delivered a package of letters from Grade 1 students in the Victoria-area suburb of Esquimalt demanding he stop bullying teachers.
The BC Teachers Federation has characterized the government's back-to-work legislation as "bullying."
"I'm sure all teachers, as well as all parents, share the view that this is appalling politicization of children, not only in the classroom, but in one of the earliest years of their lives in the classroom," Abbott said.
The Greater Victoria School District has said it has launched an investigation of the incident, but said the teacher involved has acknowledged an error in judgment.
The walkout planned for Monday has left parents scrambling for care for their kids next week.
It has also prompted businesses and even teachers fresh out of university to seize the business opportunity.
Peter Hartwick has spent the last school year looking for work after he graduated from the education program at Simon Fraser University.
The 26-year-old is a trained, certified teacher, but with the ongoing labour dispute that has hung over the province's schools since September, Hartwick hasn't been able to do much actual teaching.
"With the ongoing strike, human resources isn't really taking applications for new jobs," Hartwick said in an interview. "They're doing more crisis control, so there haven't been a whole lot of hires."
Paradoxically, the looming three-day walkout may actually provide Hartwick and a former university classmate with a few days of work. He and a friend have posted an ad on Craigslist offering to run a $40-a-day camp for children affected by the strike, focusing on outdoor activities and environmental education.
"We thought with the strike, there might be the opportunity to break into some education-related work and keep our resumes fresh with working with young kids, while also helping out parents who might be stuck in a bit of a bind," said Hartwick.
Such makeshift daycamps are just one of the options parents have been left to consider for the three-day walkout.
There are a handful of similar online ads offering various forms of childcare, and local recreation centres are calling in staff to run daycamps.
School administrators are preparing to open their doors with skeleton staffing to watch over any students who do show up, but many parents are trying to re-arrange their work schedules.
Jason Harrison, a 43-year-old stay-at-home dad in Vancouver, was already expecting to be taking care of his preschooler next week. They'll be joined by his other two children, in kindergarten and Grade 3, along with two of his friends' children he's agreed to take care of during the teachers walkout.
"We're already planning on bringing school stuff home to make sure they have their math books and their writing books," said Harrison.
"Technically, the school still has to have supervision, so if parents really wanted to, they could drop them off, but it's much more likely that they're going to try to find something else."
Harrison said the small inconvenience facing parents is worth it if it means the provincial government starts listening to teachers.
"I think the province is taking a really hard line on it," said Harrison. "They've been decreasing funding to education for quite a while, which I'm not very happy with."
The level of provincial funding for education is just one of the points of contention in the current education debate.
The provincial government is quick to point out that education funding has, in fact, increased, even as enrolment is decreasing. The latest budget includes an additional $165 million over three years to address classroom composition.
The BC Teachers' Federation, on the other hand, says education funding has not kept up with inflation, which the union argues is the same as a funding cut.
