Hundreds of public high school teachers across the province have been laid off from their full-time jobs, numbers obtained by the Star show.The Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation found that among 10 boards, the equivalent of 266 full-time teaching positions have been eliminated — with the actual numbers of teachers laid off even higher. In the Toronto District School Board alone, the changes have impacted 97 full-time equivalent jobs, or 124 teachers. The 266 doesn’t include teachers in a number of boards which are still finalizing staffing for this school year, nor secondary teachers in Catholic boards as their union is still compiling numbers. Teachers who have been laid off this school year could have been bumped into supply work, whether long term or day-by-day, or could find themselves out of work entirely. “This represents a loss of services to students,” said Harvey Bischof, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, who was at Queen’s Park on Monday with about 50 of his members who’ve been laid off or shuffled into supply work instead — including one Oakville educator bumped down to a one-semester, part-time position who had to take on a waitressing job to make ends meet.NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said she “can remember (Premier Doug) Ford saying over and over again ‘no job is going to be lost.’ ”Now, “the evidence is clear that is not happening,” Horwath told the Star. “Teachers are, in fact, losing their jobs. This bodes very badly for our education system and for our kids.”The Ontario government is looking to boost average class sizes in high schools from last year’s 22 to 25 — down from the 28 they’d originally announced as part of a four-year plan, though the lower average would still mean a loss of thousands of teaching positions.This fall, the average class size across the province was 22.5, though ...
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