Alberta school board unsuccessful cutting teacher personal days

An Alberta school board misinterpreted its collective agreement when it tried to change the number of personal leave days teachers can accumulate, an arbitration board has ruled.

The Holy Family Catholic Regional School Division No. 37, a Catholic school board in Alberta, had a collective agreement that provided paid personal leave days to teachers. The first section of the personal leave provision — article 12.1 — stated that each teacher would be granted two days per year, as long as a substitute was available and a planned program was set up. The second section — article 12.2 — stipulated that teachers could “accumulate personal days to a maximum of five.”

Normal practice was to allow teachers to accumulate up to seven days of personal leave — five from previous years as per article 12.2 and the two for the current year, as per article 12.1.

The practice changed in 2019, when the school board’s superintendent called the union’s associate coordinator of collective bargaining about a notice she would be sending about the personal leave days. The associate coordinator said he understood it was two-plus-five days but the superintendent said that wasn’t her interpretation.

A few days later, she sent him a letter indicating that the school board would be ending the practice of allowing teachers to accumulate seven personal days. Instead, teachers would only be allowed to accumulate the five days provided under article 12.2 — including two from the current year under article 12.1.

The associate coordinator didn’t respond and neither party raised the issue during collective bargaining, after which a new collective agreement was ratified. Afterwards, the associate coordinator wrote to the superintendent indicating that the union interpreted the collective agreement as allowing five accumulated personal leave days in addition to the two days granted by article 12.1. The school board didn’t change its mind and the union filed a policy grievance.

However, the school board sent a letter to all teachers stating that they could accumulate a maximum of five days, including for the current year. Any teachers who had accumulated more could use the extra days but going forward could bank a maximum of five.

The arbitration board found that both articles 12.1 and 12.2 were clear and unambiguous. The purpose of 12.1 was “clearly to provide two personal leave days to a teacher for use during that particular school year,” but it didn’t address the circumstances if a teacher didn’t use those days in that school year, said the arbitration board.

As for 12.2, the arbitration board found that it allowed teachers to accumulate personal leave days that were unused in a particular year for use later and limited how many can be accumulated to five. The “grammatical and ordinary sense of ‘accumulate’” meant unused days from prior school years and not the days earned in the current year, said the arbitration board, adding that there was no limit to how many years into the future in which the accumulated days could be used.

The arbitration board found that the union’s interpretation achieved the purposes of both articles and because the accumulated days were different than the annual allocation, the two articles didn’t need to cross-reference each other.

However, the school board’s interpretation — that the accumulation of days included the two new days granted each year — would require a clear link between the articles, which there was not, said the arbitration board. The arbitration board noted that had the intention been to include the new days in the accumulated total, then article 12.1 could have had clear wording referring to that.

The grievance was allowed and the school board was ordered to restore the personal leave days accumulated by any teachers who were affected by the change in practice.