ETFO Niagara Occasional Teachers' Local

DSBN Road Race - Volunteers Needed!

The annual DSBN Road Race raises funds to support the Education Foundation of Niagara and Niagara Nutrition Partners. Last year the Road Race was able to donate $5000 to each charity. Financial support for the Road Race is provided by its title sponsor Pen Financial Credit Union and other sponsors. This year the Road Race is being held on April 26th.

In addition to needing participants, the DSBN Road Race needs volunteers to make it all happen. This type of event is an ideal volunteer opportunity for occasional teachers. Instead of volunteering in a school doing things you really should be getting paid for (working in schools is our profession!), the DSBN Road Race gives you the chance to partner on an equal basis with other education workers and community members in an event focused on improving conditions for students within our schools.

To sign up to participate or to volunteer, go to the DSBN Road Race web site, and click on either the registration or volunteer page tabs to get the appropriate sign-up forms. Forms are due by April 9th, but they'll happily accept last-minute volunteers. Particularly, there's a need for course marshalls.

2% Pay Raise and Retro Pay March 27th

On your Friday, March 27th paycheque, you will receive a 2% pay raise retroactive to the first day of the 2008/09 school year. Our new daily rate going forward will be $200.75

This pay raise, given at this time, fulfills one of the terms of the provincial agreement signed by ETFO. However, we have not yet negotiated a new Local contract. Our contract expired August 31, 2008, and while we've put in a whole lot of work preparing for negotiations, at this point we're still in the beginning stages of negotiating a new Local agreement.

Going forward, we still have many Local working conditions issues to negotiate.

Be looking for Bulletin #8!!

Coming to mailboxes everywhere: Our new Bulletin! This is an important one in that it gives you all the information related to the Provincial Framework and what we are doing about it in Niagara!

Here's Gary's addendum to the official Bulletin from provincial, where he talks about where we stand as a Local.

New Website!

As you'll have already noticed, I've rolled out a new version of niagaraot.org. It looks a bit different, but you can still access all of our content using the menu on the right. (Our old site is still accessible, at old.niagaraot.org.)

Apart from the cosmetic changes, there are a couple of interesting new features. First, our website now has an RSS feed to which you can subscribe. This will let you view new content to the site using a feed aggregator such as Google Reader. Another new feature is the tumblelog. A tumblelog is a blog intended for short entries. You can read more about the concept here, but the short explanation is that the Executive will post updates about various things in the tumblelog which don't necessarily merit a newsletter article or Yahoo group announcement.

What really merited the site update, though, are the behind-the-scene features. The new site is based on the Blogger platform, and what that means is that any Executive member will be able to edit the site and add content quite easily. While it's been handy to have me as our resident geek, the new site should be less dependent on me (in other words, if I get hit by the proverbial bus, the web site won't come to a crashing halt). I expect that the richness of our content will increase as the other Executive members become familiar with the system and begin adding material.

Enjoy the new site. If you have any feedback or suggestions for content, feel free to e-mail me.