Hundreds of local council teachers are returning to the Sunshine list after a statistical anomaly left many ineligible last year. When the public sector annual wage disclosure was introduced in 1996, the list cited public sector employees who made $ 100,000 or more in the previous calendar year. At that time the list consisted mainly of senior executives in a number of organizations across the province. As time went on, more and more civil servants were added to the list as salaries increased. In areas such as policing, senior executives, such as chiefs and deputy chiefs, first appeared, followed by lower ranks such as inspectors, sergeants, and, finally, front-line officers. The field of education is no different. Where once inspectors and other senior executives were the only ones to complete the list, teachers eventually began to appear, years after local front-line police, nurses and firefighters began to overwhelm him. The latest Sunshine List, released on Friday, covers salaries earned in the 2021 calendar year. In it, a total of 376 teachers with the Algoma District School Board (ADSB) reported earning more than $ 100,000. This is short of the Sunshine 2020 list, which included 80 teachers with ADSB, but if you go back a year to 2019, a total of 354 teachers on this board were on the list. Marie Morin-Strom, president of the Ontario Secondary Teachers’ Federation, said the drop in 2020 was due to what she called a “strange quirk.” When a new collective bargaining agreement was reached with the province’s teachers in September 2019, it led those with more than 12 years of experience to a $ 100,000 grid that would exceed the $ 100,000 threshold and add them to the Sunshine list. “So the first year that regular teachers should have started to cross the threshold was 2020. This is a strange quirk for many of us,” said Morin-Strom. One of the payment days of some teachers occurred on December 31, 2019. “So it looks like we made more money in 2019 and, consequently, we seem to make less money in 2020 because we had a lower salary than usual,” Morin-Strom said. Simply put, some teachers appeared on the Sunshine List in 2019 before they should and did not enter the list the following year when they were supposed to have met the limit for it. Morin-Strom was one of the teachers affected by the problem. appeared on the Sunshine 2019 list, but did not reach the limit to make the 2020 version of the list. He said the idiosyncrasy has normalized this year and she, along with hundreds of other local teachers, is back on the list. “I looked for other names who have similar years of experience to me and the result was the same,” he said. Joe Santa Maria, head of operations at ADSB, noted that increases in teacher salaries are being negotiated at the provincial level. “Such things happen through central negotiations. “It is not something we were negotiating, the percentages are increasing, they are done through the Ministry of Education”, said Santa Maria. In turn, boards are being filled by the province to respond to wage increases, he said. In 2019, the Ford government passed Bill 124, which cut wages for millions of public sector employees, offering a one percent increase in wages annually. This affects teachers and nurses, as well as other professions in the fields of education and healthcare. With Ontario inflation hovering above 5% this year, many public sector unions are complaining that the wage ceiling is causing workers in those sectors to lose about 4% of their wages each year. “Education wages have fallen far behind key cost-of-living increases,” Morin-Strom said. “For the last 2 years alone, full-time ADSB contract teachers with at least 12 years of experience have been paid more than the $ 100,000 limit to be included in the Sunshine List.”
