Service with Love

Educators and staff at St. Margaret’s School are working to nurture the minds of young women  

Words Jessica Natale Woollard

Photos Aaron Lutsch

Drive onto the grounds of St. Margaret’s School in Saanich and you feel miles away from the bustling neighbourhood surrounding it. Tall trees line the road onto the 22-acre campus. To the north lies rich farmland; to the east, the beautiful Lochside Trail that connects the campus with downtown Victoria, Sooke and Sidney. Girls sporting the signature SMS red blazer convene on walkways, under trees and by the tennis courts. They exude energy, confidence and enthusiasm for learning.

The all-girls boarding and day school, with around 350 students from junior kindergarten to grade 12, celebrated its 110th anniversary in 2018. Teacher Beverley Waterfield is proud to have been there for the last 22 years, teaching every grade from 1 to 7. This school year, she’s teaching grade 5.

In an all-girls environment, you have “a chance to explore who you are as a person in a supportive structure,” Waterfield explains, noting that small class sizes mean teachers “can work with the parents on specific goals and help their daughter become the best she can be.”

The school is a real community, Waterfield adds. In addition to teaching, she enjoys being part of extra-curricular activities such as the Middle Years Council for grades 5 to 8, where the girls learn leadership skills as they plan presentations and activities for younger students.

Waterfield cherishes the moments where she witnesses the girls achieve something they didn’t think was possible. It could be a skill, a concept or a personal challenge. She remembers watching a girl who’d had heart surgery explore rocks on the beach for the first time, on a school trip to Botanical Beach in Port Renfrew. Then there was the time a tween girl got up the courage to stay overnight, away from her parents, on a school camping trip. “I’d built up a relationship with her for three years. There was a trust there that she could do it,” Waterfield remembers.

Waterfield’s family has been associated with SMS since 1969. She and her sister attended as students; her mother worked there for 27 years, serving mostly as the Junior School coordinator; her niece was involved in the rowing program; and her son worked in outdoor maintenance for a summer. When asked whether she had expected to become a teacher at her alma mater, Waterfield said, “It was one of those things that wasn’t planned; it just sort of happened.”

After receiving her Bachelor of Arts in psychology and sociology from the University of Victoria in the early 1980s, Waterfield worked as an analyst for BC’s Ministry of the Attorney General. Once she had her son, she reconsidered her career path and was drawn to teaching.

“My mum was really involved as an educator, and I was interested in that field,” she says. “I’m really happy that I did change careers.”

She re-enrolled at UVic, this time graduating with a teaching degree in 1994. In 2006, she returned to complete a master’s in education leadership studies.

At the time she graduated in the mid-’90s, teaching jobs were hard to come by. She was working as a substitute teacher in the public school system when a position came up to teach grade 4 at SMS. She didn’t get the job, but when the person who was hired didn’t work out, Waterfield gladly took over the class, overlapping with her mother, who retired from SMS at the end of that school year.

A lifelong learner, Waterfield says her teaching work provides continual opportunities to expand her mind and try new things. She explains: “I always like to challenge myself to do something different. I enjoy moving classrooms or changing grades because I think it keeps you fresh, and I think it gives you an opportunity to look at things from a different lens.”

Her passion for helping kids learn is reignited all the time. “The joy that you see in the students when they learn a new concept… That’s renewed every year when you get a new class,” she says.

Although she’s happy in her role, Waterfield has eyed administrative work at the school, looking for ways to challenge herself and advance her leadership skills. While waiting for the right opportunity, she’s become more involved with the PEA, first as a member at large in the SMS chapter, then by taking on the chair position. For the last three years, she’s also served on the Association executive.

“I chose to become more involved in the PEA so I could use my leadership skills to help with communication between the PEA and the school and make that relationship a little bit stronger,” she says. “I find being on the PEA executive really beneficial,” she continues. “It’s different than being in the education field. You get to see a glimpse of other work environments and ways of dealing with conflict, budgets, organization of a meeting. For me as an educator, that’s helping me be a lifelong learner.”

Just as Waterfield had a family history at SMS, she has a family history with the PEA. Her father, an architect with the BC government, was one of the first presidents of the newly formed union in the 1970s. From stories she’s heard, Waterfield says her dad wasn’t one of the ringleaders who created the union but was “probably the voice on the sidelines offering ideas or suggestions.” He and his professional colleagues “wanted to make sure they had an association they could rely on.”

Waterfield was at SMS when the school joined the PEA in 2000. Around the millennium, the teachers had been asking the administration for a salary comparison with other schools in the region. They discovered that SMS salaries were lower than both the public schools and other independent schools. Around the same time, Waterfield notes, the school was involved in a human rights case that left teachers feeling in need of “a little bit more protection and answers to the wage questions we’d been asking.” The teachers voted strongly in favour of joining the union. Support staff, including kitchen and maintenance staff and bus drivers, joined two years later.

Looking back on it, Waterfield says the decision to unionize “was a really positive move.”

SMS is in the third year of its current contract (Waterfield served on the bargaining committee). The head of school retired at the end of December, so a change of leadership is forthcoming. But Waterfield says the executive is focused on what they can do to support the membership.

The school’s motto is Servite in Caritate—Service with Love. It is a motto that speaks to the kind of education the students receive at SMS, and also to the kind of environment the staff help to create, for the girls and for each other.

Says Waterfield: “I really feel that we can create an atmosphere where the staff feel validated and know what they need to do and what is expected of them.”

2018 PEA Member Survey

Why our member survey matters

Words Brett Harper

“Each year, we get a chance to hear directly from our members,” says PEA Executive Director Scott McCannell. “We read each comment and concern brought forward and sort out the best way to approach the issues our members highlight.”

Every spring, the PEA begins its process of building out the annual member survey. Chapter executives, Association executive and the Association executive committees are all given an opportunity to provide input into the survey questions. The survey comprises a series of core satisfaction-related questions—a regular feature going back to the early ’90s—as well as targeted questions that assist in achieving specific objectives.

The 2018 membership survey was conducted using a web-based survey tool. The survey was sent to all members and participation was voluntary. Thirty per cent of members took part in the survey, the same participation rate as in 2017. The survey was open from June 25 to July 13, 2018. 

Members’ survey responses are the starting point for our strategic planning process. Once the survey period has closed, PEA staff analyze and compile the results into a detailed report for review by the Association executive. The results serve as a scorecard to assess the PEA’s performance and the performance of the executive director. Core questions in the survey measure member satisfaction with regard to collective bargaining, collective agreements, union communications and many other issues. 

The survey results are also reviewed with chapter executives and bargaining committees for their chapter-specific planning purposes. One issue that was voiced this year was some members’ ongoing concerns over recent changes to the public service pension plan. 

“Every year critical information is revealed in the survey results,” says McCannell. This year, a concern was raised over the treatment of members by other members at union events. “This is the type of information that we weren’t aware of, that we need to take action on.”

Mental health was an area addressed in the 2018 survey. One-third of respondents report having experienced or observed bullying or harassment in their workplace. Problems with job satisfaction, workplace morale and mental health were the top three negative impacts resulting from workload or workplace conditions.

Making Mental Health Matter

Workloads and workplace bullying are impacting PEA members’ mental health. Here’s what we’re doing about it.

Words Jackie Wong

The author Annie Dillard has famously written, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” We spend a large part of our lives at work, affirms Laura Faccone, occupational health and safety coordinator and facilitator with the BC Federation of Labour. Faccone facilitates workshops on workplace mental health, an issue she would like to see treated with the same seriousness as other occupational hazards. 

“The hazards that we typically identify with are the slips, the trips, the falls,” Faccone says. “But we often forget about the psycho-social piece.” 

Faccone’s workshops introduce participants to a process of understanding how the brain, the body and our experience of society impact each other. She also offers tools for participants to use in both their professional and personal lives that help them identify the symptoms of mental health distress and how to help a person through it.

“One in five of us in any given year—or one in three in a lifetime—will experience mental illness,” she says. “We owe it to ourselves to better our working knowledge in and around mental health if, at the end of the day, this is going to affect our outward responses to these things called life and work.” 

The PEA is offering Faccone’s workshops to local representatives through the BC Federation of Labour’s Occupational Health and Safety Centre. PEA members quickly filled the first workshop offered in November 2018. The next workshop will take place in February 2019. 

The popularity of the workshops indicates that there is widespread interest among PEA members in confronting mental health issues in the workplace, says PEA Labour Relations Officer Rhiannon Bray. This correlates with results from the 2018 member survey, in which a large proportion of members from across the province expressed concerns about mental health, bullying and harassment. 

Overwhelmed and burntout

The PEA’s 2018 membership survey found that more than half (51 per cent) of respondents believe their mental health has been negatively impacted as a result of workplace conditions. Seventy-one per cent found workload or workplace conditions to have an impact on their job satisfaction, and 65 per cent said it affects workplace morale. Nearly half of all respondents, 49 per cent, indicated that workload or workplace conditions negatively impact their work quality. 

These figures represent the experiences of 523 PEA members (270 members skipped the mental health question on the member survey). In comments submitted as part of survey, people expressed that they are overworked, and that their volume of work is at times overwhelming. Some described their workplaces as “toxic.” 
This is weighty information that the union does not take lightly. “The employer, actually, is obligated to provide its workers an environment free of bullying and harassment,” notes Rhiannon Bray. “WorkSafeBC guidelines changed in 2013 to address different areas of bullying and harassment.” 

But addressing members’ experiences of anxiety and low morale in a meaningful way is not always easy. Like any kind of complex work, it requires support, education and a practical roadmap on how to move forward. 

“It shouldn’t be that way”

It’s difficult to address mental health concerns in a workplace when employers lack the tools, vocabulary and skills to effectively support individuals who are struggling. Bray points to the cultural expectations that many of us have been told to adopt when encountering interpersonal conflict or stress at work. “In years gone by, it was kind of like, ‘toughen up,’” she says. 

Bullying, harassment or extraordinary stress, she adds, have often been talked about as an expected, if unpleasant, part of the fabric of one’s career. But Bray notes, “It’s not that way anymore. And I’m glad that it’s not that way because it shouldn’t be that way.”

The 2018 survey results support several of the proposals put forward by members at the PEA’s last convention. “They were all around workplace bullying and harassment, and basically encouraging the PEA to address these issues for its members in the workplace,” Bray explains. 

“Based on those convention resolutions, which were approved by the membership at convention, we began to take some action towards implementing what those resolutions had instructed.”

Some of that work shows up in Laura Faccone’s workshops for local reps. The objective of the training sessions is for local representatives to emerge with practical tools for supporting workers with mental health concerns, both individually and collectively.

While many of the participants are local reps or members of OHS committees, Faccone has designed the training to offer flexible strategies that can be adapted for a variety of settings. 

“Whether you’re on your [occupational health and safety] committee or not, this matters, because we all have our bodies, and we all have this beautiful brain that’s attached to our bodies,” she says. “Ultimately, that brain’s going to control your outward responses to the environment that you’re in—whether it’s at home, at work or in your community.”

Building tools to support each other 

Participants in Faccone’s Workplace Bullying and Harassment training will gain facility in the following subject areas:

• myths and facts of mental illness
• stigmas associated with mental illness
• organizational factors that contribute to mental   illness
• CSA (Canadian Standards Association) standards for psychological health and safety, and how to apply them 
• other available resources 

It’s the first time the PEA has offered mental health training to its local representatives, and the sessions have been met with great enthusiasm “The uptake that we received was incredible. The class filled very quickly,” Bray says. 

As a labour relations officer, Bray frequently receives calls from members who wish to inquire about situations they encounter in which they feel bullied or harassed. “Usually, by the time that they contact me, it’s showing up as some sort of mental health issue; they’re experiencing depression or anxiety around their job,” she says. “I think people are becoming more aware that it’s not acceptable to be treated that way.”

She’s hopeful that the BCFED training sessions will empower more members to meaningfully act upon issues of bullying and harassment and support coworkers who are struggling. 

“I hope that the participants learn about what their rights are and the members learn about what their rights are, in terms of experiencing bullying and harassment in the workplace. And I also hope that they’re just not looking out for their rights, but they’re also looking out for their coworkers,” she says.

Bray wants the wider PEA membership to know that they’re not alone in their struggle. “The PEA is there to support them and make sure that they have a workplace where they’re able to be successful.”