 We've added some self-booking blocks for talking to an RTU executive assistant. Fill out the form, and an executive assistant will phone you back at the appointed time. Find it HERE.  We've also added self-serve booking for RTU visits to your school!We'll come for your lunch hour with Swag and answer any questions your staff has. You can book up to 60 days in advance, but not closer than 4 days. Find it HERE. As teachers we’re used to dealing with 2 types of year, school year and calendar year, on a regular basis. Oddly enough, many of us forget that our “yearly” salary from the collective step scale does not correspond to the fiscal year. This is of course due to our raises coming in April and, when applicable, step increases occurring in August, at the start of a new school year. Even a teacher on the top step has two different “yearly” salaries in a calendar year. Need an example? Let’s take a Step-9 teacher starting in January of 2024. All numbers are gross, before any deductions.
If we add up these 3 values $18,689 and $37,863 and $18,164 we get $74,717. You will not find $74,717 anywhere on a contract or in a collective agreement. All contracts are written for SCHOOL years, not financial years. These amounts will all vary with step level and percentage contract. But wait……there’s more! You may have received student teacher monies, oversize compensation, sick day payouts, and/or medical insurance contributions. All of these are taxable forms of income that also must be included in your gross earnings. These monies are all very particular to the specific teacher and further change the amount reported on your tax documents. The salary scale really is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to calculating your pay. The table below has sample rough calculations for every step. Find the step you were in last school year and follow that line across.   How the withheld taxes on your retro payment will be calculated. August 19th, 2024 UPDATE: The payment will be made on the paychecque of August 29th, 2024. The interest accrued since August 9th will be included on the same paychecque. The Provincial Agreement has been signed. This means that there are sixty calendar days until our retro payments are due, making their deadline August 9th, 2024. If this deadline is not met, interest will begin to accrue from this date. How do you know if your retroactive pay is correct? A couple of points:
For example, a High School teacher was on parental leave. For the weeks where only QPIP was received, no retroactive salary will be paid for this period. There was no salary from the school board earned during that period, to be subject to the pay increases. For the period where she was back at work, retroactive pay will be calculated. Another example would be a part-time teacher who had two weeks of no work between contracts within a year. This teacher would not earn retroactive pay for those two weeks of not working, so their payout would be lower by 5% (10 days out of 200 not worked). There was an increase in substitution rates. Therefore, casual supply will generate a retroactive payment. The provided calculations have two red columns, one for each raise that occurred. The second red column accounts for the fact that the retroactivity from April 2024 is only for 8 of a year’s 26 payments, not a full school year. The total of these two columns is the teal column at the far right, which is the approximate gross* repayment that someone on that step can expect, based on a full 100% workload. *Gross amounts calculated are before any deductions are made. All retroactive payments will be subject to all deductions usually taken off of every paycheck (varies by teacher).    The commun front has released a document outlining the new agreement. Here are some highlights. 
Find the complete document here. 
The three confusing categories of work that aren’t teaching…. OPD or Other professional duties (workload described in provincial and local ententes) Comp time or compensated time (from local entente) Value added (from provincial entente) So you are on a committee or running a student musical or another non-teaching activity, where does it fit? The first question to ask is approval from your administrator. Do this before embarking on any activity. Activities outside of the classroom that involve students require administration and governing board approval well in advance. Personal projects, PD and Committees have various manners of being selected, assigned or elected to. What they all have in common though is that your administrator is aware of your involvement before it occurs. Once that’s settled comes the question of which of 3 possible categories does the activity fit in? There are some hard rules.
Any activity that does not involve students can be OPD or Comp Time. The decision of where certain activities fall should have been discussed at the school council. Generally, most schools have a culture of which committees and activities are workload and which ones are not.  Workload or not?
If an activity is OPD it is part of your yearly workload or what you are doing to earn your salary. If it is comp time it is extra for which you receive time off, up to three pedagogical days. If the activity is value-added it is also not part of your workload and you will receive a modest monetary remuneration at the end of the school year. How much money for value added? A whole other article worth of explanation. How much time off? 20 to 39 hours of activity = 1 pedagogical day 40 to 59 hours of activity = 2 pedagogical days 60 + hours of activity = 3 pedagogical days Can I take them whenever I want? No, your admin gets final say. They cannot block you from taking them, but can decide the when and how of it. They can require that you take two half days instead of one whole day. The days are usually the last pedagogical days at the end of the school year. Does that mean someone else will do my report cards/marking/close my classroom/tidy my desk? No, you must complete all your workload duties before taking the comp time. How does group insurance work? We all put money into a pot. Whenever someone from the group needs to cover an approved expense they take money from the pot. The fact that we are a large group of people paying into the same pot means we can each contribute a moderate amount, but have access to large amounts of money if something goes wrong. In order for this system to work there are rules about how much must be kept in the “pot” in order to adequately cover the expected claims. These amounts are calculated based on a series of factors. Some of the factors include: historic claim levels, current long term commitments to claimants, the level of risk in the population insured and others. Some factors that raise our contributions are the small number of teachers in QPAT and the fact that our employers make no contributions. Every penny paid out by IA is a penny paid in by a teacher. The fact that there are no contributions to the health plan from the government is why our insurance is more expensive than many others. Most Industries subsidize health premiums as one of the non-monetary benefits of a position. The insurance benefit we receive from the school board is 2 year salary insurance in case of illness. Teachers do not pay premiums for this, it is separate from our QPAT health insurance. Why does a separate company manage the insurance funds? Insurance is an industry unto itself. It has a large number of regulations and legal obligations. In addition, even a small group like QPAT generates hundreds of claims every week, and dozens of complicated unique situations a month. QPAT has an executive who’s dossier is to facilitate between teachers and IA in the complicated cases. QPAT retains its focus on teachers by hiring specialists to deal with the legalities and fiscal obligations. Does the company ever change? QPAT goes to market roughly every 4 to 6 years to reassess the company that manages the insurance fund. The companies describe their services and capabilities and fee rate. QPAT then considers the bids and decides whether to continue with the current servicer or switch to a new one. Not all insurance companies are interested. There can be interesting roadblocks, for instance the insurance servicer must work with the GRICS pay system, and many do not want to. Where does any extra money go? Nowhere, it stays in the fund, or back to teachers as a premium holiday. How does the insurance servicer make their money? The insurance servicer makes the same money regardless of the claims accepted or denied. The money in the fund is never theirs. They earn a set fee, normally a percentage based on the size of the fund. Larger funds will have more participants and therefore more claims to process hence the percentage model. Denying claims does not earn them extra money. Who decides what is covered under QPAT insurance? QPAT. The process is initially discussed at the membership plans committee, who makes a recommendation to the executive committee, who makes a recommendation to the board of directors. The board of directors can make a final decision, but can also redirect it to the AGM meeting if a consensus cannot be reached, or the issue is deemed a major change. The point of the different committees is to try and weed out any really bad ideas and ideally also to prevent groupthink. Each of the committees have a different composition from union staff to local union executives that sit on them. There is no limit on what the plan can theoretically cover, but all additional coverage comes with an associated premium amount. For instance, dental coverage causes a large premium increase. There is a legal obligation to have money in the fund to cover the claims. Why do our premiums go up most years? The insurance servicer reviews the claims that were made in the previous year and uses that to estimate the likely financial needs of the fund in the following year. By law, they are required to estimate high. Also, certain types of claims carry higher fiscal responsibilities. For instance, long term disability claims require that the fund have enough money set aside to cover the claimant until their 65th birthday. If the claimant returns to work, then that obligation ends. The fiscal responsibilities increase and decrease based on the health of our teaching population. Over the last few years there has been an increase in the claims that carry heavy long-term fiscal responsibilities for the fund.The premium increases occur in January. Who is responsible for insurance paperwork? The teacher for claims and the school board for changes in enrollment. It’s the school board's job to provide you with the forms and forward them to IA for any changes to usage of the insurance plan. The easiest way for teachers to submit claims is through IA’s client space, if you have registered for it. You can upload photos of receipts and register for direct deposit.
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RTU-SER10 Boul. Churchill, Suite 201,
Greenfield Park (Québec) J4V 2L7 |
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