By: Victoria Gray
Production Editor
Reading week could disappear this year while the college battles with the Ontario Public Service Employees Union.
Chris Ballard, 22, a sports journalism student at Centennial’s Centre for Creative Communications has plans to go to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. to visit his parents on the March break.
“I moved up here in January, I’m from Newfoundland originally. By the time May gets here…I’m going to want to see (my parents),” he says.
Getting rid of the March break is one of the strike contingency plans to compensate for lost time. Students, like Ballard who have already plans for the break face a hard dilemma if there’s a strike and reading week is cancelled: Cancel their plans or miss a week of school.
“I’ll probably still go…I’ll make up the day or two I have to miss,” he says.
Ballard feels the school has failed to give him and his classmates adequate information regarding the strike. He had no idea that faculty would be voting on Wednesday, Feb. 10 on the college’s final offer.
“To be honest, I’m not well enough informed to be scared yet. I don’t know enough of what is really going on or what the implications will be for myself,” he says.
The vice president of the Centennial College Student Association Inc. at the CCC, Carl Anthony John, said the faculty would walk off the job on Feb. 17 if the outcome of this vote were to strike.
“If things continue to go the way that they are, which is having no progress at all, we could see our full time faculty striking…if they deny the offer on Wednesday,” he says.
As for Ballard he will still go to Florida to visit his parents.
“This is a birthday gift from my parents they are bringing me down there…I’m not from here I don’t see my parents all the time,” he says.
John says cancelling reading week in case of a strike would protect some students. John understands Centennial’s contingency plan takes into account students who have leases that will be ending when the semester ends.
“They want to make sure some of our students are not left homeless for the end of their semester if it’s extended,” he say.
The communications officer at the CCC, Mark Toljagic, does not know if students will lose their March break but recalls the outcome of the last strike.
“The last time was a strike in 2006. It lasted a little over three weeks and the March break was sacrificed to help make up for the lost time. If there is a strike of a similar duration that’s probably one of the first things to go would be the March break,” he says.
Nobody knows exactly what is going to happen to the March break because it depends on the length of the strike and Centennial’s decision after the strike has ended.
“Unfortunately anything could happen if you have plans for March break you may be asked to come back to school and that’s just the reality of the system right now,” Toljagic says.
Just like four years ago, students like Ballard have been left in a lurch, having no idea what to do, if anything, with their March break plans.
