Teacher Stipends

[dtengineering]

In BC all teacher salaries are negotiated through a province-wide collective bargaining process.* Extracurricular activities are anything above and beyond the normal hours of work and demands of the provincially approved curriculum and are strictly voluntary. The board cannot insist that a teacher provide extracurricular activities, nor can they compensate the teacher for doing so.

What I do appreciate, however, perhaps more than a stipend, is when the school board makes it easy for us to find the "release time" (funding for substitute teachers) to take part in FRC events. It would be nice to have a bit more of that. It would also be nice to see us able to run a small robotics class off the school timetable and with a slightly smaller number of students than the average class size.

So those would be on my "wish list" before a stipend, but that is because we have negotiated the contract that we have. If we had a different contract and if athletic coaches were getting a stipend, then darn straight I'd be demanding one for being an FRC coach. That is only fair!

Jason

*The Supreme Court of Canada has found that the provincial government is somewhat unclear on what, exactly, "Negotiating" means....

[Zyik]

One of the parents put out a stipend to see if we could lure in a teacher to the robotics team. Sadly, none of them would touch us. He ended up taking it himself. We had a physics teacher once, but he left a couple years ago for personal reasons.

You never realize how much the teacher does for the team until they leave. Interfacing with the school is a lot harder when you don't have them. If you have to put out a stipend to keep them around its worth it.

[artdutra04]

Teacher stipends are a great idea for the team coaches on a robotics team.

As part of their annual sponsorship of Team 228, our town's Board of Education earmarks $4k of the $10k alloted to us every year explicitly for a coach/teacher stipend. It's usually ended up being $3k for the main coach per year, with two additional $500 stipends.