The Professional Conduct Unit is a department of the Ministry of Education that accepts reports on ANYONE who is a certificate holder. Under the School Act that means (teacher, school counsellor, vice principal, principal, director of instructor, assistant superintendent, superintendent – EXCEPT the Secretary-Treasurer).
The Teacher’s Standards. Your complaint needs to be tied to how their behaviour/decisions is a marked departure from the Teacher’s standards. There are different standards from public school and private school.
****** IF YOU ARE FILING A HUMAN RIGHTS COMPLAINT******* You may want to consider filing Teacher Regulation Branch complaints on those involved. If your mediation meeting doesn’t reach a settlement and you move to the document disclosure phase, you can make an application to the BC HRT to obtain the documents that the teachers sent in. If multiple people are involved, they tend to send evidence on the other people to take the heat of themselves and then you may be able to gather more evidence for your human rights complaint.
Good to Know Info:
- Here is a blog on common Questions and Answers
. - Parents can absolutely file complaints; it doesn’t need to just come from the district.
. - The TRB will want you to meet with the superintendent before you file the complaint. (I have filed anyway due to complex reasons). But, this can also be a way for you to meet with the Superintendent if you wish. However, each and every complaint will be processed the same, whether you complete this step or not.
. - ALL complaints will be accepted for processing. All will be read.
. - The person you are complaining about will receive the complaint within 7 business days after you submit it. They will get everything you submitted against them.
. - Once you submit a complaint, you cannot withdraw it later. Even if you change your mind, the process cannot be interrupted. You can write in that you would like it withdrawn and that will be considered with the review.
. - The TRB intake officer may tell you, you need to know the exact name on the certificate holder in order to file a complaint. Not true. As long as you know the person’s name (the name they use in their position) and the district they are in, you can file a complaint and they will match them up in their own internal database. (Districts will tell you they cannot give you the name on the certificate due to privacy reasons. You can file anyways)
. - When you file the complaint, it is easy to assume that once you have filed all of your evidence, and you send in the form, you cannot send in more evidence if you come across it at a later date. You CAN submit further information later. However, they prefer that you submit it all once at the beginning. The Commissioner has 60 business days to decide if they are going to see action on your complaint or not. I don’t know when the exact cutoff date is, (DO ASK), but you can submit further info and it should be considered. As of July 2024, complaints are taking one year to process.
. - After you submit your complaint you should get an official letter 3-5 business days after. This will come with a password for you to access.
. - You have the option of being interviewed and it will be recorded. This gives you an added opportunity to add any information and clarify. The Commissioner will listen to your recording. You can submit an FOI to get a copy of the recording if you wish.
. - If you are not happy with the results and you feel that their response is incorrect, the BC Supreme Court (Judicial Review) is not your only route. This route will cost you money. You can file a complaint with Ombudsperson and they will review it to see if they will investigate it. This route is free but the results will be different. It is not the same thing. If you are going the route of filing a judicial review I advise you to please consult a lawyer.
. - A superintendent must report to the TRB when a teacher has been involved in professional misconduct. If you feel a teacher should be reported but you don’t want to be the one who files the complaint, you can ask the Superintendent.
1. Will you be filing a report to the TRB?
2. Will you be writing them a Letter of Direction that will go into their file? (For an example on a Consent resolution that has a Letter of Direction in it, read this Consent Resolution.
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Good to Know – Public Consent Resolutions
For reading up on the consent resolutions that have already been posted, click on my Advocacy for Decisions page. This can be VERY helpful. If you are dealing with similar issues, it shows you and the school that you can file a compliant on this topic and something may be done about it.
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Also note: it is common for the district to move staff around when they have issues with them. Even if the teacher has been removed from your child’s class, it just means they have been put back on the TOC list and will end up somewhere else. When you submit a complaint it stays on their file, so if in the future another parent complains about that teacher, the first complaint will be taken into consideration.
Letter of Direction
If you are struggling with a teacher who you think needs some professional guidance, you can explicitly ask the Superintendent to write a Letter of Direction for their file.
Superintendents have the duty to report teachers who are not following the Teachers Standards to the TRB. So even if you don’t want to file a complaint, the school should be creating a document trail about this and reporting it to the TRB.
What if they Lie?
Question to the TRB – How does one proceed if a certificate holder lied or withheld information to create a false impression or mislead the Commissioner during the TRB process?
Answer from the TRB – “You are entitled to file a new complaint about any matter that was not part of the allegations set out in your original complaints. A complaint alleging that a certificate holder lied or mislead the Commissioner should articulate what the certificate holder lied about, when the certificate holder lied, and how you know it was a lie. Similarly, it should set out what information was withheld by the certificate holder and how you know that this information was purposefully withheld.”
Answer from the Ministry of Education – “You ask about teacher conduct during a professional conduct investigation, within the framework of the Teachers Act. My colleagues in the Ministry of Education’s Professional Conduct Unit indicate the responsibilities of certificate holders are set out in the Professional Standards established by the BC Teachers Council. Standard 2 requires teachers to act ethically and honestly. The Teachers Act sets out investigative processes and powers of the Commissioner, and the issue of whether a certificate holder has acted ethically or honestly during an investigation is a matter for the Commissioner to review, in the context of the standards. If the Commissioner believes a teacher has acted dishonestly or unethically during an investigation, the Commissioner can initiate a separate investigation into that matter. The Commissioner can receive complaints about a teacher’s ethical conduct during an investigation from any person and will review and address such complaints.”
You can file a complaint with the Ombudsperson BC citing unfair process. The TRB doesn’t have a fair process for parents and this was outlined in this Human Rights Case . You will want to explain to Ombudsperson that it’s like they are committing perjury. The TRB may try and slip out of addressing the issue and just say they can’t re-assess a closed case. BUT, you need to say NO – I am not asking you to re-assess the issue I am asking you to assess the lying. That is different. Someone can commit murder in the pool house, but they commit perjury in court. You want the commissioner to not assess the “murder” but the perjury. They may try and be sneaky with you. Be clear. You are filing a complaint for the lying.
Submitting FOI Requests
You can submit an FOI (Freedom of Information) request after you have received your decision letters to gain access to what they submitted. There is just no guarantee that it wont be heavily redacted. (In my case, all information was withheld under S.22) I got nothing. You could then file a complaint with OICP and an adjudicator could make a decision on whether they can be ordered to hand over the documents.
Links
There is A LOT of info on the TRB website, so you will need to set aside quite a bit of time to really click on all of the links and follow the maze of info.
Here is the link for the standards certificate holders need to follow.
Here are the Commissioner’s Rules, they must follow.
To see the statistics of how many complaints get through and those that don’t, click below.
For those who would like to submit their decision letter to the BC Supreme Court for a Judicial review, you will have 60 days to do so. For information on the process see link below.
https://supremecourtbc.ca/sites/default/files/web/Judicial-Review.pdf