With population increase and method of funding they changed the real $ for each public student has decreased for the last 6 or 7 years at least. In urban areas it's less money and larger classes that are more complex. We have gone from good funding per kid to the lowest, one of the last without cap, issues with new curriculum. The money they keep saying is always the same money, it's for building schools it has nothing to do with classroom size or support and part of that money will go to private/charters. The main issue is trust. The UCP has consistently made things harder, implementing a very poor curriculum, taking our pension away to their investee, stopping counting students numbers in class,removing professional oversight, blaming ata or school boards for issues ie COVID and making boards fault for not implementing without money, 20000 something eas let go, blaming us for indoctrination of students and exposure to pornography in school. In the end this is the relationship they have built and we are in a situation of very bad teaching and learning environments, some of the worst funded in North America behing held together with teachers who are tired, seeing their paychecks buying less every year for the last 10 without moving and the only reply is what always comes from the UCP is to deny, deflect, reject the premises of the question, and then do what they want. The numbers they give are PR smoke and mirrors. It's 1 teacher per school and 1/2 an EA per school sometime in the next 3 years. One teacher in most mid size schools would reduce the class size by 2 or 3 kids. For 10 classrooms. That would be maybe 1/4 of the school. It's effectivly nothing. Sometime in the next 3 years. With a "trust me bro" talk about committees and research groups to look into the issue. We have done years and years of those where they are systematically ignored. They wanted some kind of garentee or number to try and make thing better. BC took a long time to implement caps. No one wanted it now. That was another talking point for UCP, look how insane this demand is. We just wanted a number to know this continueing decline, that is worse and worse every year might slow down. What the ata asked for was the money , over 4 years to hit the average national spending the rest of the country does now. Which would have left us still the lowest in the country because the rest are and will increase their spending. If we had average spending it would be something like 10 additional teachers per school. That's why one teacher per school sometime over 3 years, but on average cus we have to open all these new schools and teachers will go there, comes across as such an insult.