Students deserve Educational Assistants, not hold times

A help line launched Wednesday for parents and students is a sad and insulting replacement for the 8,000 educational assistants who were helping kids adapt to learning in a quarantine.

CUPE Alberta President Rory Gill called Education Minister Adriana LaGrange ‘clueless’ if she thinks a help line is going to replace trained staff she sacked on May 1.

“An educational assistant has a handful of students. They work with individual teachers on the lesson plans and implements them according to the individual needs of the student” said Gill. “Replacing that person with a help line, where someone new answers the phone each time, someone who doesn’t know the student, the lesson, the teacher or the plan, is a joke”.

“Adriana LaGrange and Jason Kenney took resources away from Alberta’s most vulnerable special needs students,” said Gill. “They left them floundering and vulnerable. This help line is no help.”

“Alberta’s special needs students and their parents deserve real resources, not hold times.”