1940s
Teachers and Students Struggle
in Aging Rural Schools, 1948
- Saskatchewan Archives Board
Gib Eamer, who first took up his position as general secretary of the Federation in 1940, reflected 24 years later that one of the biggest tasks that faced the STF in its early years was restoring teachers’ self-confidence. “Teachers had just become completely demoralized. You have no concept how demoralized they were. I think maybe the best work we ever did was to give them back their self-respect.”
Years of poverty and helplessness wore them down until many left the teaching profession and others were ashamed to acknowledge they were teachers. The first secretaries of the Federation became itinerant preachers of the new word about teachers and teaching. Wray Wylie remembers that “one thing the Federation has been blessed with in its early years was that we had three secretaries who were dynamic speakers — first Lorne Titus, then Jack Sturdy and then Gib Eamer. They were all different in their individual ways, but nevertheless they could inspire people.” It was Jack Sturdy who inspired Wray Wylie to get involved in STF work, and Hector Trout remembers Gib Eamer’s fiery addresses to the summer school gatherings. “He was ready to fight to the last to make sure that teachers were not ill-treated.”
Trout also remembers that “there was a grand change taking place all around the province” at the beginning of the ‘40s, because boards found that instead of a long list of teachers available to them it was difficult to hire teachers, so they were automatically raising the pay rates. And teachers, instead of negotiating a higher rate with their current boards, would move up to a higher salary by changing employers.
“To go in and negotiate, in the type of situation you have in negotiations—antagonism a bit you know—you hesitated to do it. It was much easier to accept a job that was being advertised for more money. Also, it was difficult to fight for yourself. Gib, of course, was ready to fight for teachers any time.”
The war in Europe was responsible for the teacher shortage, and had become the single overriding issue to which everything else was related. It was imposing its stamp on everyone’s rhetorical style, and the STF was no exception. In the opening salvo of the 1940 salary campaign, in a memorandum of January 1940, Jack Sturdy again compared teachers to the Maginot Line:
“Today we are at war! Many of our Saskatchewan citizens will soon be manning the Maginot Line which we look upon as a bulwark of defence against the forces which would destroy liberty and freedom and all those democratic institutions which are dear to us. Just as surely have we a Maginot Line in this province—a line which holds at bay the forces of illiteracy, ignorance, selfishness and despair. This Maginot Line does not consist of mighty forts of steel and concrete, but of little forts, wooden for the most part, over 5,000 of them—the primary schools of this province. Just as surely as we neglect these defences, permit them to fall into disrepair, man them with dissatisfied and neglected soldiers, so shall the enemy prevail, and though we win abroad, we shall suffer irreparable defeat and ignominy at home. Let it not be said there is money for the one and not for the other.”
Ironically, as the ‘40s wore on the “Maginot Line” of teachers nearly crumbled as had the real Maginot Line, as teachers continued to desert the profession.
Fundraising for the war effort became a cause for education. In 1943 the Minister of Education reported that pupils in Saskatchewan schools had purchased over $150,000 in war savings stamps and certificates in the previous year. As a reward for this effort the quota was raised to $250,000, and the school children rose to the occasion by turning in nearly $290,000!
Canadian soldiers who had made prodigious efforts in the First World War had returned home to depressed economic conditions, shortages and labour unrest. No one wanted to repeat that experience or to resume the Depression of the ‘30s where it had left off. By 1943 “reconstruction” was emerging as a major issue in planning for the domestic economy. The Saskatchewan government appointed the “Cronkite Council on Reconstruction” in 1943 to make plans for the post-war period, and the STF Council that year considered President W.S. Lloyd’s comprehensive 18-point proposal for a brief to the reconstruction council.
The first item of STF concern was the larger unit of school administration. The larger unit was a companion issue to minimum salaries. The STF’s publications, resolutions and delegations to government, continually put forward the theme of the larger unit of administration as an alternative to the parochial single school/single teacher/single board model which, the STF argued, was anachronistic—true educational progress was synonymous with the larger unit of administration. Alberta, which had some time before adopted the system of a central co-ordinating board and the consolidation of small schools, was held up as a shining example of progress. As it did with every change it promoted, the STF claimed that it “was not fighting a selfish battle. It is true that the larger unit will aid the profession. But it has broader and more important aims… so that boys and girls may have the opportunity to achieve the fullest possible development…”
Teachers were bitter when the legislation of 1940 permitted such reorganization but put the onus on the public to petition in great numbers for this reform to be effected in any jurisdiction. The STF saw this as a deceitful approach and continued to press for the mandatory implementation of the larger unit of administration.
The new system, it was claimed, would result in administrative efficiency, equalize rural and urban educational opportunities and rationalize the rural taxation structure. The greater efficiency of schools was to be exemplified by division boards composed of “men of experience and ability, not swayed by narrow local interests.” Better and more experienced teachers could be assigned to the “heavier” schools, and teacher transfers would eliminate all “undignified disturbances.” Teacher salaries would, for the first time, be paid on time and every month, and arrears would be erased. A favourable and equitable salary schedule could be achieved through, significantly, a process of negotiations with teacher representatives. A planned approach to the repair and construction of school buildings, savings to be made through large scale buying of equipment, and the development of centralized libraries were sure to follow. High school programs could finally be offered to rural students previously unable to obtain them. Since it was firmly believed these benefits would be automatic if the new system were adopted, one can be sympathetic to the feelings that motivated the STF to accuse its opponents of selfish and narrow conservatism, and understand its bitter frustration with the reluctance of government to legislate the new system. It took a change in government and the co-operation of the new CCF minister of education, W.S. Lloyd, to see reorganization required.
Wray Wylie recalls that Woodrow Lloyd had been a “staunch advocate” of the larger units of administration when he was president of the Federation. “He had the whole plan that the Federation ‘struck,’ you might say, during his time of being president. (Lloyd was part way through his fourth term as president when he was elected and named to the cabinet.) So he simply took the Federation’s plan and set it up.”
Looking back over the intervening 30 years, Wray Wylie sympathizes with the local resistance to the scheme:
"The ratepayers were so afraid the country schools were going to be taken away from them. And it’s a fact that they were taken away from them. Our area was settled principally by Central European people, and this was their focal point in the community. And they were so afraid that they were going to lose that focal point. They were very sincere in their feelings, and at the same time they wanted their children to get the best education possible. And as soon as they saw what could be done as a result of the larger unit of administration, how the children could be taken to larger schools, brought into contact with other students, that they were going to enlarge their education, well the battle was over.”
That message was certainly not the only message that teachers were getting across about the larger units. For some, greater efficiency in the administration of school finances was the main interest. In May of 1945 the STF central office found it necessary to issue a strong editorial note on the issue:
"We have had reports in central office from two or three localities that teachers are boosting the establishment of the larger units because the setting up of a unit will mean increased salaries for teachers. This in itself might be a sufficient reason, but if it were the only reason, it is doubtful whether the STF would be very much interested in the establishment of larger units. One thing is fairly certain, if this is the best or only argument that a teacher can put up for the establishment of the larger unit, that teacher will be doing the larger unit a real kindness by saying nothing. With the statutory minimum of $1,200 coming into effect on the first of July, salary increases are going to come, with or without the larger unit."
“…The teachers are not, never were, and never will be, the primary consideration in a school. The pupils are the centre of interest and it is their rights and advantages which must be considered. The advantages to the pupils to be obtained through the larger unit are so many and so clear that no one who is at all familiar with the setup need use any weak argument.”
As the end of the ‘40s approached teachers and trustees were inching toward the establishment of provincial salary scales. The statutory minima first introduced at the beginning of the decade were “the thick edge of the wedge.” Moreover, the teacher supply situation had reversed itself. The shortage was now so acute that school boards were bidding for teachers rather than the other way around. Trustees were looking for ways to protect the poorer, usually rural districts from being bid out of the market. A province-wide “gentlemen’s agreement” seemed to be the answer.
At the same time, however, the introduction of the larger unit of administration was creating a workable framework for negotiation at the local level. By 1947 nearly every salary schedule in effect in the larger units of administration had been negotiated with teachers, and not merely imposed by unilateral decisions of the unit boards.
In 1949, with the passage of the Teachers’ Salary Negotiations Act, the choice was made for collective bargaining at the local rather than the provincial level. Teachers were gaining experience with local negotiations and finding that these meetings provided opportunity for agreements on a much broader front than salaries alone. As well, the trustees did not at the time have a strong provincial organization, as did the teachers, and could not guarantee their members’ adherence to voluntary provincial guidelines. Local autonomy was more important to many trustees than a united front.
Hector Trout was on the executive of the STF for the first time in 1947, after several years as a councillor, and so witnessed the almost comic-opera divisions undermining the trustees’ participation in “gentlemen’s agreements.” He remembers:
“In 1947 the executive met with the executive of the Trustees Association in Regina with R.J. Davidson, a member of the Department of Education, chairing the meeting."
“There were two camps that we could recognize in the trustees’ group—those that were trying to keep it as low as possible and those that were ready to go along with a fair and reasonable salary agreement. We broke for supper, and after supper we met again. In the course of that two or three hour meeting Gib Eamer started to display quite a bit of exasperation. I don’t know whether he was truly exasperated or not, but he would start to pack up his briefcase after every exchange with one of the members who was trying to keep the salaries as low as possible. Every time he did, it seemed that progress would be made very quickly.”
Negotiations got to the point where the trustees and the STF were only $100 to $200 apart, and the STF group offered to leave the final decision up to a member of the trustee group who was accepted by both sides as a decision maker, Norman McGillivray. However, McGillivray’s recommendation, which was to accept the STF proposal, was in effect repudiated by the then president of the Trustees Association in a “secret” letter advising them to regard the recommendation as maximum figures to be negotiated down from. The exasperated Federation protested this perverse interpretation of the agreement to no avail.