A report card for Education Minister Dominic Cardy from the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association.
It’s a first for the NBTA.
President Connie Keating says they wanted to focus on what has worked well this year and discuss where growth is needed.
The lowest grade was given to school infrastructure investment, “We’ve seen through COVID that there is a need for infrastructure improvements, certainly in air quality. Some areas really are in need of new schools. At this point, there hasn’t been a lot of investment, so we gave an E for effort rather than an F because it would depend on where you live in the province. In some areas certainly, their infrastructure has been updated in the last few years and we will see a new school in Hanwell in the Fredericton area opened in the fall. So we didn’t feel that it was appropriate to give an F.”
(Photo: submitted by NBTA)
She adds that there have been some gains, but progress is still needed.
Keating is interested to see what type of recovery plan there will be in the fall after COVID-19 because nothing concrete has been presented by the Education Minister to this point.
The NBTA commended Dominic Cardy on his passion for the Education system, and his strong understanding of it, “Minister Cardy would be one of the very few ministers of education that we have worked with who really has a sincere passion for the education system and has a, what we would consider, a fairly strong understanding of it. And so, we gave him an A+ in that area. There were a number of, what we would call critical events and incidents over the last year or two,” Keating adds. “That’s where this report card is assessing, and he always made himself available. He was willing to have conversations. We certainly didn’t always agree on the approach, but the fact that he was open to communication that we could reach out at a moment’s notice. That really was, in my opinion, a huge benefit to how things were handled this year.”
Education Minister Dominic Cardy has seen the report card and Keating admits he was surprised by it.
“We explained the whole point of the report card was an opportunity to create conversation. We certainly were very fair,” Keating says.
She feels they also had a very positive discussion with the Minister about what needs to be put into place moving forward.
This sentiment was echoed by the president of l’Association des enseignantes et enseignants du Nouveau-Brunswick, Nathalie Brideau, who also released her report for the francophone education sector.
