Nearly 13,000 classroom assistants stationed in Quebec schools

Since September, Claudine Caron has benefited from the support of a classroom assistant. Dayousse, a daycare educator, comes to help him for an hour a day.

We feel supported, we feel less alonecongratulates Claudine. She believes that with her colleague, she is able to better meet the needs of students. When we have 26 students in the class, even though we have experience, we cannot help each student.

There are several students in his class with intervention plans, which is not uncommon in Saint-Marcel. There are children who have special needs in certain subjects, such as reading, writing or mathematics, says Dayousse. Well, I work with these children.

At Saint-Marcel school, where 22% of its 383 students have intervention plans, eight classroom support positions have been created to support teaching staff. They are deployed in around twenty classes.

In this establishment, as elsewhere in Quebec, it is mainly daycare educators who fulfill this function.

Annie Caron, second-year teacher, says that in addition to helping students who are having difficulties, the class assistant ensures that discipline is respected. I can concentrate on the more academic part while she will help me manage the more behavioral partshe rejoices.

She says that the two hours that Lyne spends daily in class with her allows her to lighten her workload.

It really changes my practice. When there are two of us in the class, it allows us to respond more quickly to students.

Claudine Caron deplores, however, that she does not have more time to sit down with her colleague in order to plan and [de] talk to each other.

Under the agreements in principle concluded with the teaching unions, the Legault government is committed to creating classroom assistant positions throughout the network preschool and primary school. The measure aims to reduce the burden on teaching staff in classes with several students in difficulty.

At Saint-Marcel, classroom helpers are therefore naturally found in groups where the needs of students and those of teachers are greatest, where there are several students with intervention plans. What we want is the improvement of academic results, it is the well-being of our studentssays director Catherine Brault.

I would tell you that staff are perhaps less out of breath and have more time to devote to learning and teaching tasks.

The Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, is delighted that the school service centers have managed to hire so many classroom assistants in just three months. He says the 13,000 aides provide support in almost half of the primary and five-year-old kindergarten classes.

Everyone is a winner! welcomes the minister. The teachers win because they have someone to help them, the educators are valued and the children have even more support.

This is one of the greatest advances in education in recent decades.

He does not rule out the possibility that other classroom assistants may eventually be hired in the school network.

For the president of the Autonomous Education Federation, Mélanie Hubert, it will take a little more time to take stock of the experience, see how it all comes together. For her part, Kathleen Legault, president of the Montreal Association of School Directors, issues this warning: We should not think that adding these resources solves the fact that we lack professional staff, among other things.

Even if the positions of classroom assistants and daycare educators are combined in schools, the president of the Fédération québécoise des establishments d’enseignement, Nicolas Prévost, notes that some educators now prefer to work in class with teachers rather than daycare.

It has become so attractive that there are educators who will drop childcare to just help in the classroom and since we are in a situation of shortage, we have no choice but to give up.

Minister Drainville affirms that this is, however, a marginal phenomenon.

Last year, there were classroom support pilot projects in 200 schools. There are 26,000 teaching assistants in Ontario schools, a pioneer in the field, of which 20,000 are at the elementary level.

In this province, thanks to the model adopted and the measures put in place, far fewer students than in Quebec need an intervention plan or individual support measures to succeed.