Juno News - October 24, 2025


Alberta’s province-wide teacher strike has now kept more than 700,000 students out of class


Episode Stats

Length

1 minute

Words per Minute

182.68564

Word Count

351

Sentence Count

21


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 What brought you guys out today and what exactly is it that teachers are asking for from the government?
00:00:04.860 It seems like the government keeps saying that teachers aren't telling them what we want and what we need,
00:00:10.200 but we've been very, very clear that we need to address the class sizes and complexity in the classroom.
00:00:16.060 I've moved to a bigger school this year and I have 38 20-1 English students in one of my classes.
00:00:22.020 Keeping that managed, marking load-wise, keeping the kids all engaged is getting to be almost, well it is impossible,
00:00:28.180 and it's exhausting and it's burning teachers out.
00:00:30.380 The teachers' main demand is class caps.
00:00:32.880 Our classes are completely overrun now with kids.
00:00:36.400 Some of the biggest issues are trying to get class sizes down to something manageable
00:00:41.020 and, you know, providing a scenario that is best for kids, right, in learning.
00:00:47.300 Smaller class sizes and classroom caps would be great.
00:00:51.900 Most of Alberta's rapid population growth has come from immigration.
00:00:56.040 Do you guys feel like that's why the class sizes are increasing?
00:00:59.300 Not necessarily.
00:01:00.440 I think that's part of the equation that we have to look at.
00:01:04.460 But we have people moving to Alberta all the time from all across Canada, from all over the place.
00:01:09.360 I wouldn't say that that is primarily the concern with our classroom sizes in my experience.
00:01:14.860 I also feel like it's important for us to have immigration and it's a part of our culture as Canadians and it's a part of our growing society.
00:01:22.420 Daniel Smith actually held a campaign to encourage tons of people to come to Alberta.
00:01:28.140 I forget what the name was.
00:01:30.140 So I think the immigration idea is a complete scapegoat.
00:01:33.420 It's a complete distraction.
00:01:34.760 There is an issue with how much the population has grown.
00:01:39.500 However, I mean, we had lots of indications of this early on,
00:01:43.500 and there was delays in getting things funded and growing.
00:01:46.920 And you know what?
00:01:48.560 People are here.
00:01:49.640 We need to educate them, right?
00:01:51.440 So we need to work on solutions now, not in five years.