Hundreds of teachers hired since NDP took office; ‘we need more,’ education minister says

Manitoba public schools have added 832 new funded teacher positions since a caucus filled with former educators won the 2023 election.

Education Minister Tracy Schmidt announced on Wednesday that there’s been a six per cent increase in these positions since she and her NDP colleagues took office.

Schmidt’s department declined to provide the latest student enrollment figures — they are collected annually at the end of the first month of school — to contextualize the data.

The overall student population grew two per cent from September 2023 to September 2024.

“When the number of students in our system goes up, we expect that the number of teachers goes up,” said Lillian Klausen, who represents 17,000 certified teachers, as well as working principals and clinicians.

Multiple professionals may also be staffing a single, provincially funded teacher position, Klausen said.

The president of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society said she welcomes the additional staffing, but it is only “part of the puzzle.”

NDP MLAs hosted a news conference at École DSFM Sage Creek — the newest addition to the Division scolaire franco-manitobaine — to tout the news Wednesday.

“We need more teachers here in Manitoba — we especially need more French teachers,” Schmidt told a crowd made up primarily of schoolchildren and educators.

“Right here, in the DSFM, 27 new French teachers were hired this year.”

In 2021, Manitoba’s then-Progressive Conservative government started working on a strategy to recruit and retain French-language teachers.

Division scolaire franco-manitobaine, Université de Saint-Boniface and francophone teachers helped draft a road map for 2023-26. Francophone and French immersion programs were experiencing “unprecedented growth” at the time of its release in July 2023.

MTS is far more concerned about retention than recruitment, Klausen said, noting there’s an “alarming” number of early-career teachers who are leaving the profession within five years of entering it.

There are 13,903 funded teachers this school year, up from 13,071 in 2023-24.

The francophone division has created 41 new teaching positions over the last two years.

During that time, there have been hundreds of other hires, including 577 educational assistants and 72 clinicians, provincial data show.

Dozens of those additions reflect the province has opened multiple schools over the last 24 months.

Among them: two new elementary schools with French programming in Sage Creek, including École DSFM Sage Creek and École Sage Creek Bonavista.

Citing the former government’s approval of these plans, PC education critic Wayne Ewasko had two words for his predecessor, “You’re welcome.”

“It was us that planted those trees. They’re just there to get on their little step stool and pick the fruit from the branches,” the education minister-turned-critic told reporters.

Ewasko, a certified teacher, oversaw the kindergarten-to-Grade 12 file before his party lost the 2023 election.

There are two more francophone schools in Manitoba than there were 20 years ago.

Enrollment grew 4.4 per cent from September 2023 to 2024, the latest numbers show.

“We would like to have even more than 27 new teachers this year so we need to work in collaboration to ensure our French-language schooling remains strong,” superintendent Alain Laberge told a news conference at his division’s newest school.

Laberge, whose first language is French, delivered remarks both in English and French; he made those comments in French.

Also Wednesday, Schmidt called teachers “the heart of our education system.”

The MLA for Rossmere is the daughter of career public school teachers. She has three school-aged children.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca