About 30 teachers at Queanbeyan High School have gone on strike for two hours this morning over concerns about ongoing staff shortages.
Last Monday, the school announced that students in years seven to 10 would only be able to attend on-campus classes three days per week due to a chronic shortage of teachers.
That decision was reversed the following day after the NSW Department of Education stepped in and told the school to resume full-time face-to-face teaching.
But Mitch Andrews from the New South Wales Teachers Federation said teachers were unhappy with the decision and three-quarters of them walked off in protest at 9:00am, leaving a skeleton staff to supervise students.
"We're at the point now [where] we've had over 100 hours of our senior students, so six weeks, where they haven't been in a class, they've been in the library.
"It's their last two years of school, they need to be in front of their teacher every day and we can't offer that at the moment, it's physically impossible."
NSW Department of Education deputy secretary of school performance, Murat Dizdar, told the ABC this morning, that the department was committed to giving teachers the support they needed and was working with the school to fill vacancies.
"We acknowledge that they need our support. There's a number of vacancies there, a number of COVID impacts," he said.
"Our school workforce unit met with the principal and is working to fill some of those vacancies.
'No correspondence' between union and department
Before this morning's strike, Mr Dizdar said all students and staff would be on site today and that he hoped the department could "work productively" with the Teachers Federation.
"There's no mixed messages here, there's the continuity of teaching and learning in full-time operations inside the school gates," he told ABC Radio Canberra.
But Mr Andrews said union representatives who had contacted the Education Department had "not received any correspondence at all", prompting today's protest.
"If we have suitable staff numbers that allow us to teach our classes and supervise the students, we would love to be at school, that's what we want to do," he said.
"But at this point in time, we physically can't do that."
He said the two extra teachers deployed to the school from the corporate office last Thursday and Friday had not been enough to help the situation.
"On Friday we had 11 senior classes still in the library, we had 18 merged classes, we had eight classes in the [quadrangle] on minimal supervision," he said.
Mr Andrews did not rule out further industrial action if mixed-mode learning wasn't re-instated or vacant teaching roles were not immediately filled.
He said teachers would be sending another letter to the NSW Education Minister today in hope of a response.
"The teachers are past the point of breaking, they're exhausted, they're trying their best to make sure their students are working in a safe environment and the minister and their department are not working with us to make that happen," he said.
