B.C. education assistants subsidize schools with thousands of unpaid hours

Special-education assistants are subsidizing public schools with hundreds of thousands of extra hours of work each year, according to a survey by their union.
The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) says the work is unrecognized and often unpaid.
The survey last spring brought responses from 40 per cent of the 12,500 EAs who work in B.C. public schools. EAs provide services to students, primarily in special education but also in ESL and First Nations programming.
The unrecognized and often unpaid work amounts to about 800,000 hours a year, CUPE says. Some of that time is reclaimed through informal school-level arrangements, it adds, but much of it is not. "The unpaid time represents a financial subsidy by EAs to the public school system worth several millions of dollars every year," CUPE says in a release today.