The teacher at the centre of the ongoing math saga at New Westminster Secondary School won't be teaching for the remainder of the school year.
New Westminster Ron Unger said he learned yesterday that his son would get a new Grade 9 math teacher.
"I just know what my son came home and told me yesterday is that, as of yesterday, they have a new math teacher for the rest of the semester," said Unger. "Typical 15-year-old boy, he tells me the basics."
Unger wrote an opinion piece that was published in the May 25 edition of The Record, on his son's experience with a math teacher who came under fire recently when two parents began talking to the media about what they believed was an unusually high failure rate in their children's class.
Unger said he didn't have a "vendetta" for the teacher.
"She needed help teaching, but it's an administrative failure, I think, more than anything," he said. "I see it as an administrative failure that they didn't address the problem with the teaching before, but the solution with the teacher is to work with them to get their teaching level up."
He criticized the district's handling of the math situation, saying that it was their job to ensure that problems are addressed through re-training and working with the union.
"To me it's like any other business, no employee group is going to work flawlessly all the time, so management's responsibility is to work with the employees as a group and create a good, strong teams and deal with effectiveness by retraining or what ever, and that hasn't been happening. It's more 'let's pretend there's not a problem' and so that's frustrating, and then not communicate with stakeholders, which in this case is parents."
The Record contacted the school district superintendent and assistant-superintendent for more information and to confirm whether she would be teaching at all at the high school, but did not receive a response by press time. The district has refused to discuss personnel matters, citing legal constraints.
