By Tracy Sherlock, Vancouver Sun | Link to Article
Hundreds of English as a Second Language students were turned away this week and dozens of ESL instructors will be losing their jobs at Vancouver Community College in the coming days, an education leader said Friday.
By Tracy Sherlock, Vancouver Sun | Link to Article
Hundreds of English as a Second Language students were turned away this week and dozens of ESL instructors will be losing their jobs at Vancouver Community College in the coming days, an education leader said Friday.
Karen Shortt, president of the VCC Faculty Association, said people were crying after waiting in long line ups only to be told that ESL classes were full for the coming term.
VCC has been teaching about 3,000 ESL students each term, but as of April 1 funding will be cut so the school cannot offer as many spaces, Shortt said.
Nahid Parandakhteh, 36, was one of the students who didn’t get into an ESL class. She immigrated to Canada from Iran, where she was a hairdresser, nearly two years ago and took some English training at VCC last year. She works in retail, but needs to improve her English before enrolling in the hairdressing program at VCC.
After four hours in line on Thursday, Parandakhteh was told the class she needed was full.
“I am so disappointed that I couldn’t register,” Parandakhteh said. “I’m an adult and I need to go to work, but my English isn’t that good.”
VCC is the largest provider of ESL training in Western Canada and has been in the business for more than 40 years. ESL makes up about 25 per cent of the college’s services. Some of these services will continue, including English Language Services for Adults (ELSA), which is a federally funded program for new immigrants with beginning English skills, Shortt said.
The college’s ESL programs employ 170 instructors, Shortt said. Of those, 45 term instructors have already been let go, and 22 have taken early retirement as of April 1. Another 70 instructors were expected to be given advance layoff notices on April 1, until the province announced $3.25 million in additional one-time funding for VCC. That funding, along with $4.67 million announced in February, will likely only extend at least some ESL programming through the next school year, Shortt said.
Students and faculty at the college have launched the ESL Matters campaign to urge the B.C. government to pick up the funding of ESL in post-secondary schools.
The executive director of VCC’s students’ union Nimmi Takkar said the group has heard from thousands of students who are upset about the cuts. She said the funding announcement Friday is good news, but only a beginning.
“We think it’s a step in the right direction, and students are excited that the government is listening to the thousands of students who have spoken up through the ESL Matters campaign,” Takkar said. “But this is only step one. There needs to be a much more long-term plan on how ESL is going to be funded in British Columbia.”
The Ministry of Advanced Education said in its news release about the new funding that it will work with public post-secondary institutions to develop a long-term strategy for the delivery of ESL, and mitigate the impact on students.
Shortt said this is encouraging, but Friday’s announcement would not replace lost ESL classes, most of which are in lower-level instruction.
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