For any school support staff who have not yet read our report, we urge every member to take a look at Safe Staff, Safe Schools: A worker-led review of violence in Nova Scotia’s public schools. Violence in public school is at crisis level. The 2022-2023 school year saw 27,000 violent incidents in public schools across Nova Scotia. And we know that with barriers to reporting, a lack of support from management, and overworked staff, that number is likely even higher. If the last year saw similar numbers, increasing at a similar rate as the last few years, we can estimate well over 30,000 incidents in the 2023-24 year also. Why did we write this report? In 2022, we tried to sound the alarm to Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development Becky Druhan and Tim Houston’s PC government about the crisis of violence in our schools. We shared our concerns … Read more…

As we shared in our last update, the employer is unwilling to meet us at a provincial table. Despite efforts to divide us, we are still coordinating bargaining. The NSSBCU will continue to be at each local’s table so that our common proposals can be negotiated in a way that is organized, coordinated, and united—this is our mandate. Beyond that, it’s clear that if we give in and start to bargain provincial proposals separately, the employer will take full advantage of the separate tables and attempt to bargain inequality into our contracts. We know that the EECD is fine with major disparities between locals as we’ve spent the past year harmonizing wages across the province to address just that. This is a tactic to cultivate resentment and discontent amongst workers. Without coordinated bargaining, they will be able to go for the one item they can’t legislate or negotiate away: our … Read more…