New Alberta government regulator for educators is floundering, critics say

October 21, 2024 Canuck

Nearly two years after a government-appointed commissioner took over policing Alberta teachers, no disciplinary hearings have been held under the new process and decertifications have stalled.

Some complainants and respondents say they’ve been left waiting months — sometimes more than a year — for any information or progress on their cases.

Five former employees of the Alberta Teaching Profession Commission (ATPC) who spoke to CBC News describe an operation that is chaotic, inconsistent, unfair and inefficient. CBC has agreed not to identify them due to their concerns about potential professional repercussions of speaking publicly.

Past commission employees and the Alberta Teachers’ Association said in interviews there is no prioritization of cases where teachers’ behaviour could put students or colleagues at risk.

“Instead of going after the bad apples, they’re shaking the whole apple tree,” one former ATPC employee told CBC News.

The delays leave critics worried that teachers who may have harmed students are still working in classrooms.

Some teachers accused of wrongdoing say the long waits without information have left them sick with stress.

Morgan Derksen, who was a Grade 3 teacher in northern Alberta, said her career has been paralyzed for months while the commission investigates what Derksen says is a frivolous complaint about a social media video she posted while on parental leave.

“Every day I wake up and I’m just waiting for the piano to fall on my head,” Derksen said in a September interview. “Every day since this happened, I am in constant fight or flight.”

The Alberta Teachers’ Association, the union representing about 46,000 educators, knows of 57 teachers whose cases before the commission have been stagnant for 300 days or longer.

A white man in a dark suit and light shirt and plaid tie has clear-framed glasses and a short beard. — Tim Jeffares is associate co-ordinator of regulatory affairs for the Alberta Teachers’ Association. (Submitted by the Alberta Teachers’ Association)

Tim Jeffares, ATA’s associate co-ordinator of regulatory affairs, says those teachers have not heard from the commission, been asked to present evidence, or had their case progress to the next stage for nearly a year. One teacher has waited more than 400 days for any information, Jeffares said.

“I can’t think of a single case that’s proceeding in any sort of reasonable time frame,” Jeffares said.

What prompted change

In December 2021, then-Education Minister Adriana LaGrange announced the United Conservative Party government would remove the ATA’s power to police its members — a function the association had done for more than 80 years.

The ATA was the last teachers’ organization in Canada to both discipline rule-breaking teachers and represent teachers during collective bargaining. LaGrange said it was a conflict of interest.

The decision follows similar moves by governments in B.C., Ontario and Saskatchewan to create independent processes for teacher discipline.

When introducing legislation in 2022 to make the changes, LaGrange said a teaching commission operating under the government umbrella would resolve complaints more quickly and improve safety for students.

When it began operating in January 2023, the ATPC began accepting complaints about any Alberta educator, including private school teachers and superintendents. The commissioner is responsible for deciding which complaints merit investigation, and how complaints should be resolved.

Including active cases transferred from former regulatory bodies, the ATPC received 649 complaints in its first 21 months. As of Sept. 20, the ministry said 26 per cent of those cases had been concluded by any means, including withdrawn complaints.

It’s a larger load than its predecessor handled. Before 2023, the ATA investigated complaints against most of the province’s teachers. In the last three years, the ATA received between 126 and 177 complaints per year.

Julia Sproule, ATPC commissioner, said in an interview last month that complaints vary in complexity.

“This first year-to-18 months has been very unique,” she said.

Sproule said her office is obligated to report any incident where a teacher is believed to have harmed a student to law enforcement and the teacher’s employer. But any decisions about removing a teacher from a classroom are up to the school or school division that hired the teacher, she said.

“We endeavour to complete complaints within a timely manner and there’s different factors that may be considered in terms of when the complaint was completed,” she said.

The problems inside

The commissioner’s office realized during the first year it needed more staff to handle the glut of complaints, said Kevin Lee, press secretary to Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides, in a June email.

Last August, the government called for outside help, issuing an RFP for private investigation services. Alberta Education hired five companies, spending about $135,000 on investigators to work on 16 cases as of mid-September.

Seventeen of the 20 staff positions in the ATPC are filled.

The five past employees CBC News interviewed all resigned from the organization within the first year. They described an operation that lacked formal decision-making processes, where managers did not listen to their suggestions from working with other agencies that ran investigations.

They said some frivolous complaints against teachers are being referred for investigation or other processes when they should be dismissed. They said these choices are bogging down the system.

Some employees also told CBC that files were left untouched for months. The employees alleged investigators would officially open a file to meet the timelines set in legislation, then set it aside.

Few cases dismissed

According to the most recent data published last week, the ATPC referred almost half the complaints it has received to investigation, and dismissed about 16 per cent of them.

The status of disciplinary hearings is unclear. The ATPC’s public reports say the commissioner had referred 29 cases to a hearing panel, but do not say how many hearings have been held.

The commissioner said some hearings are scheduled. However, the commission website says, “There are currently no upcoming hearings.”

An education ministry spokesperson said because the cases were transferred to the commissioner from the old processes, they’re not obligated to tell the public about the hearings.

The old regulators were running between 24 and 34 hearings per year combined.

CBC News looked at the volumes of cases and decisions some other independent Alberta professional regulators are handling. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta and the Law Society of Alberta, which regulates lawyers, outright dismissed a larger proportion of complaints upfront, and a small fraction of them led to formal investigations. About one-to-two per cent of their cases led to a hearing.

For example, the college of physicians and surgeons gets about 1,000 complaints a year, a spokesperson said. In 2023, 550 complaints were dismissed outright. That same year, the college conducted 130 investigations.

Both regulators also have target timelines for cases. The law society follows national standards saying investigators should be communicating with most complainants and professionals at least every 90 days.

Alberta Education did not answer questions about whether the ATPC has timeline goals beyond those required by law. Sproule said it was too early to give an average timeline to resolve a case.

The problems outside

Some of those who filed complaints about teachers and who spoke to CBC News were also frustrated by their interactions with the commission.

One Alberta family who filed complaints about several educators abandoned those complaints after losing trust in the ATPC.

CBC News cannot identify the family because there is a court-ordered publication ban on the identity of their second-oldest child, whose experiences led to their teacher complaints.

In 2019, two fellow students accused their child, then 14, of sexual assault. The family alleges the child’s school and school division mishandled the complaints. They say that mishandling led to police laying seven criminal charges. More than two years later, the case fell apart in court and the Crown dismissed the charges.

The parents filed professional conduct complaints with the ATPC about seven educators involved in the case. The parents say their actions triggered a lengthy ordeal that derailed their child’s life and destroyed their finances.

ATPC employees documented information incorrectly at least twice, according to the parents, which was not fixed when the parents pointed out the mistakes, they said.

They say the process was challenging to navigate. The child’s stepfather said it was up to him to identify which sections of provincial laws and standards he believed the educators had breached.

A woman in a black shirt with dark hair. — Julia Sproule is commissioner of the ATPC. (Submitted by the Alberta government)

In a letter to the ATPC last year abandoning their complaints, the parents say the systems “are incapable of functioning in a timely manner, collaboratively, with transparency, accountability, and without bias.”

“There is no protection for kids,” the stepfather said in a September interview. “… It seems like everybody’s out to protect themselves.”

The child’s mother said they had hoped the complaints would improve school practices, to save other families from similar suffering.

“You look your kiddo in the eye and you promise, ‘We’re going to keep you safe. We’re going to do better.’ So when that doesn’t come to fruition, it feels like we failed,” she said.

Since the ATPC took charge of investigations in 2023, fewer teachers have been removed from classrooms.

Although the complaints process changed, it’s always been the education minister’s role to suspend or revoke teaching certificates for incompetence or wrongdoing.

The number of teacher certificates the minister suspended or revoked dropped in 2023. So far in 2024, the minister has suspended one teacher’s certificate, according to the government’s public teacher registry.

Meanwhile, teachers facing any complaint — even vexatious ones — may not be able to change jobs while investigations languish, the ATA’s Jeffares said.

Those educators have a note placed on their certificate to “contact the registrar for more information,” according to the education ministry.

“The best I can come up with is to call this a trauma-rich regulatory practice at every turn,” Jeffares said.

Tried twice for one alleged misstep

Derksen, the northern Alberta teacher who faced blowback from a social media post in which she is angry about violence directed against 2SLGBTQ+ people, doesn’t know if she’ll ever teach again.

In the video, which disappeared from her private Instagram account after 24 hours, she said she used expletives to tell people who hold discriminatory views to unfollow her account.

The province’s code of professional conduct for teachers says the professionals “are accountable for their conduct, on and off duty, and are expected to conduct themselves with due regard to the honour, dignity, welfare, rights and best interests of students and the teaching profession.”

Derksen and her representatives say the ATPC has handled her case in a procedurally unfair way.

A parent first complained to the ATPC about Derksen’s video in February 2024, according to case documents. About six weeks later, the commissioner wrote to Derksen, saying the allegation was without merit and she would take no further action.

However, on May 3, the commission told Derksen it had received a second complaint about the video, which also alleged the teacher “is bringing her beliefs into the classroom knowing full well that they are opposing to those of most of her students and their families.”‘

Derksen hasn’t taught since December 2022, when she went on parental leave. She resigned from the school division in May, but she wants to be able to teach again.

“This affected every single part of my life and who I am. What I’ve been working for forever,” said Derksen.

jason schilling, alberta teachers, alberta teachers' association, alberta education, alberta budget, alberta schools — Alberta Teachers’ Association president Jason Schilling says the Alberta government rushed to take over teacher regulation and was unprepared to do the work properly. (Janet French/CBC )

Jason Schilling, ATA president, said the commission is running haphazardly because the government rushed to take over the disciplinary process without understanding the complexity of the work.

“It’s doing a disservice to teachers,” he said. “It’s doing a disservice to students and their families and the public good.”

Sproule said the commission is continually looking at other regulatory bodies for best practices, but when pressed, could not name one regulatory college the ATPC has turned to as a model.

The focus is on dealing with cases and issuing decisions in a timely manner, she said.

Hearings, once they begin, will be conducted by a provincial conduct and competency panel, which the commissioner says she has no authority over.

The government lists 29 panel members on its website, and it has recently appointed three more teachers to the panel and will be appointing 14 more people. A larger group should make it easier to convene hearings, a ministry spokesperson said.

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