1950s
Hon. Woodrow S. Lloyd, Minister of Education
Speaks at Council Banquet, 1955
- Saskatchewan Bulletin
As a direct result of the passage of the Teachers’ Salary Negotiations Act, Hector Trout was hired as a field worker for the Federation, thus completing what George J. Trapp, Minister of Education and former STF President, referred to at Gib Eamer’s retirement as “the holy trinity” — “Gib, Emma and Hector.” Emma Stewart ran the office, and Gib Eamer and Hector Trout were on the road, travelling nearly 30,000 miles a year. Trout recalls the two years after the passage of the Negotiations Act as especially hectic:
“At the time it was passed there were some larger school units already in existence, but a good part of the province was not under the larger school units. So every rural school or teacher had to negotiate with her or his board, every town staff that wasn’t in a unit had to negotiate with the school board.”
“Gib and I travelled over the province, sitting down with staffs first of all and explaining to them the Act and the right which was given them, and persuading them to meet with their school board and negotiate a salary agreement.”
“I think we covered every town. We couldn’t do every rural school that existed, but we divided the province up. I believe that we met with every staff, and often with the boards too, because they were not aware of the Act in the first year or two.”
"I remember going to Melville School Superintendency. First thing in the morning I would contact the school and say, ‘I’d like to meet the staff before school.’ Then I’d phone the chairman of the board and ask if I could meet with the school board. It amazed me the reception I got. Invariably the chairman would get the board together.”
“At dinner time you’d meet the staff of the next town, in the afternoon the school board. After school you’d meet the staff in the next town, and in the evening the school board. You’d do about two or three towns a day.”
“It’s always been important in the Federation to get the Federation out to the teachers. When we were working with a small staff it was a matter of survival. We couldn’t possibly do all the work that had to be done, so we had to involve teachers. We used to say: ‘Write, and if you can’t do what you want to do by writing, phone, and if you can’t do it by phone, go! Write, phone, go.’ And we went.”
Wray Wylie, who was on the executive from 1947 to 1949, and from 1954 until his term as President in 1959-60, remembers how essential the teacher participation became in those years. He believes it’s what makes the Federation tick.
“I think you have to remember the Federation really got started in a substantial way by the grassroots movement, getting teachers at the local level to do things. These advisory committees to the executive whereby we had teachers working in various parts of the province coming in two or three or four times a year to do work for the Federation and to advise on such matters as superannuation, curriculum, and so on… these are the people that really meant a great deal to the Federation. I think they were one of the great foundations of the Federation. I don’t know what we would have done without them. Along the way I think we should remember the great sacrifices that people made working on these committees, being away from their families.”
It seemed like an unbeatable combination in the early ‘5Os, which also saw the passage of the Teacher Tenure Act in 1952. By the time the Negotiations Act and the Tenure Act came before the legislature the Trustees Association was lobbying for them along with the Teachers’ Federation. Hector Trout describes how this cooperation came to pass:
“The reason we got the Acts that protected teachers and gave them the right to apply for conciliation boards and so on was because we had raised so much hell before by our ‘in dispute’ activities. We put boards in dispute and they couldn’t get teachers, and they had a lot of trouble. At last the Trustees Association was ready to go along with us in getting the legislation.”
The trustees had their own ways of fighting back. Trout remembers that three years after the passage of the Salary Negotiations Act there were 35 conciliation boards during the summer. “I think it was deliberate, to try to overwhelm us. They persuaded boards to go to the conciliation stage of a dispute at the drop of a hat.”
However, the Federation acquired a reputation for winning its cases “quite a number of times,” Trout relates.
“I’ve had members of school boards say to me when I’ve been sitting in a meeting, ‘Oh, well, we might as well close school and turn it all over to the Federation! You guys run everything anyway!’"
“I’ve had this said to me a number of times, at the moment when they realize they haven’t a ghost of a chance of winning a board of reference or anything else. It was a defence type of thing, and once you got used to it, it rolled off your back and you tried to be conciliatory, because they were giving in at that point.”
“We did win practically 90 per cent of the cases. With salary conciliation you never quite win – you don’t get all you want – but with boards of reference, and when teachers were fired, we won over 90 per cent. The reason was we would go in first and interview everyone and get into the situation fully. And if the teacher was wrong we would say so. That’s why we won so many cases. It was only the good ones that we’d fight.”
The Federation can, although it rarely has, refuse to defend a teacher. In general, the STF’s policy was to advise a teacher with an unsupportable case to move to another school. Throughout the ‘50s and into the ‘60s there were more jobs than teachers, and mobility solved many conflicts arising out of personality clashes, stress and the occasional application of bad judgment. Mobility was also known to lay temptation in the path of weakness; in 1951 some 19 teachers were before the STF discipline committee for jumping contracts in response to better offers.
In the same year there were 543 “study supervisors” in Saskatchewan schools, according to the Department of Education—persons with no teacher training, some with less than Grade 12, hired to “babysit” students taking lessons by correspondence in schools that could hire no teacher at all. Two years later President George Hindley of the Saskatchewan School Trustees Association described how one superintendent of his acquaintance was recruiting:
“…I have made a survey of my superintendency, and I found out just how many ex-teachers there were living in the superintendency. And so I got in my car, started out; when I saw the farmers out in the field, I’d slip into the house, get on my knees and plead with the wife to come out and teach.”
Hindley thought that method didn’t speak very well for the situation of education in Saskatchewan.
The Federation saw the time as propitious to enhance its public relations, to improve the status of the profession in the eyes of the general public, and to add recruits to the ranks of teachers. The STF advisory committee on public relations generated recruitment materials, and the STF publication, Public Relations Handbook for Teachers, became a bible for teachers in the field.
The Federation also rapidly came to the conclusion that the best possible recruitment technique was improvement of the standards of the profession itself. Standards of entrance into the profession were raised in 1953 when a complete second year of professional training was made a requirement for a permanent certificate. Local bargaining committees began to include provisions to tie increments to increased qualifications, and teachers were urged to improve their qualifications through part-time study.
They responded by making summer school virtually a way of life in the late ‘40s and for most of the ‘50s. Many of the teachers who obtained a degree in the ‘50s did it almost exclusively via correspondence and summer school. They had one year of training in the normal school or teachers’ college, which was counted as the intramural year toward their degree, and they did the rest piecemeal.
By mid-decade more than four-fifths of the students enrolled in the university’s summer programs were teachers, even though the painfully slow increase in salary scales made the effort a financial burden to many. Sylvia Berryere, who joined the STF office staff in 1950, remembers that the benevolent fund was frequently tapped during summers.
“When I first started there were a lot of benevolent cases. A lot of people could not afford to go to university or to summer school. They’d get ‘big’ loans of $25 to tide their families over, then they’d pay them back at $5 a month or $2.50, and teachers were most appreciative.”
Emma Stewart told the Bulletin in 1974 that “particularly on a Saturday we’d have them sitting on the floor, lines of them, waiting to see someone.”
The practice of direct contact between members and Federation staff, especially the clerical and support staff, was evident even in the ‘50s. Sylvia Berryere credits Gib Eamer with establishing the tradition.
“Mr. Eamer always wanted it to be a very personal thing. If a teacher came in we were all there to help the teacher, so whoever could help them should. I understand from teachers who have moved to other provinces that there is no comparison in going into other teacher organizations. Maybe it’s because they’re larger. I hope we never lose it.”
Administrative relationships were never cut and dried in the central office. She recalls that when she became office supervisor, about the time that Emma Stewart retired, “the change in organization was evolutionary. You took your responsibility little by little and divided up the work. ” As time went on and more staff were hired, the generalist approach was maintained as far as possible. “I think the philosophy was that you were to work towards a general knowledge … we were one big office ‘pool.’” Until the late ‘5Os the Federation’s preoccupation with teacher welfare imposed its own uniformity on the work of the STF. While in its submissions to government the Federation frequently dealt with “professional development” issues such as curriculum development, teacher education, in-service activities, or teaching resources, it was not until the late ‘5Os that both teachers and the Federation had the resources to undertake their own programs.
Thus the real burgeoning of professional development activities is the story of the ‘60s. However, Stirling McDowell, former general secretary, recalls that the seeds were planted in the ‘5Os. In 1953 there was a summer course which was a credit class in curriculum development and revision, the report of which was printed by the STF, and in 1957 there was a major effort in administration in the form of a three-week summer short course for principals organized by John Egnatoff, who started his term as STF president that fall.
McDowell joined the staff in 1956 as a research assistant investigating merit pay and took up a permanent appointment in 1957. His presence made it possible for Hector Trout to branch out into professional development. Over the next five years Trout introduced hundreds of teachers to the fascination of Cuisenaire rods, giving the first impetus to the evolution of a “PD” program that by the ‘80s would account for half the Federation’s budget.