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New Westminster CUPE prez wants more hours for support staff

The president of CUPE local 409 wants the New Westminster school district to pay for an extra 45 minutes a week for his members who work with special-needs students with the roughly $700,000 of additional funding the district is getting this year.

The president of CUPE local 409 wants the New Westminster school district to pay for an extra 45 minutes a week for his members who work with special-needs students with the roughly $700,000 of additional funding the district is getting this year.Marcel Marsolais said the district is now saying it will only pay for an additional half an hour each week to student support staff who work less than 35 hours a week."As of yesterday, there's been no movement on the 30 minutes," Marsolais told The Record on Thursday afternoon. "It's disappointing."CUPE's share of that ($700,000) fund is around $89,000, and, right now, it's just not going to work out to the 45 minutes that we negotiated," Marsolais said.The district is receiving almost three-quarters of a million dollars of funding through the Learning Improvement Fund from Bill 22, called the Education Improvement Act, which was introduced last year, during the ongoing teachers' strike. School district can use the extra funding to hire additional staff or extend hours to meet the needs of students.Many other school districts in the Lower Mainland are giving their support staff an extra hour a week, Marsolais said."School District 40, we seem to attract special-needs students and special-needs parents because we provide a great service," he said.CUPE's portion of the Learning Improvement Fund was about 12.5 per cent, but that number could be bumped up slightly when benefits are accounted for.Marsolais said the union is sending a delegation to the next school board meeting on Sept. 25 to lobby the board."Basically we are calling on the trustees to do the right thing," he said. "This is all about recognition and respect."Trustee Michael Ewen said he had the same understanding as Marsolais that the SEAs were getting 45 minutes additional funding, but has since heard thats "not true." "I'm told we got funding based on the number of SEAs (special education assistants) and with the additional number of SEAs that we are hiring, it's actually not going to amount to 45 minutes, now that doesn't mean the board can't top it up to 45 minutes," he said. "My understanding was that the 45 minutes extra was simply to acknowledge work that they were already doing."A CUPE local 409-commissioned review from 2007 found that a significant number of special education assistants put in more than two hours a week of unpaid work time at New Westminster schools and felt their contributions are not fully recognized.Eighty-one per cent of education assistants regularly perform unpaid work because the majority of them found it "impossible to work assigned hours and provide good service," according to the review.The survey was based on responses from 92 special education assistants out of approximately 120 working in the New Westminster School District in 2006.