Park work: High Five training

Jane Wells

In 2017 I participated in one of the City’s High Five training sessions, as a part-time employee of Parks, Forestry and Recreation.

Teaching children is something I have been engaged in and thinking about for half my life, having worked as a drama teacher for over 20 years in a licensed school age daycare. I agreed with much of the content in the High Five training and was happy to problem solve in small groups, presented with imagined situations of a difficult or reluctant child. The people I met through the day were largely engaged and thoughtful in their responses, and I left the session thinking that of those who were actively teaching with PFR (inevitably the participants who were the most vocal), they all seemed competent and concerned about their responsibilities.

I did not get the impression that these people were any further ahead at the end of their day of “training”.

Fundamentally, I question this term ‘training’: a day of instructional activities and handouts does not actually constitute training. For a credential-fixated bureaucratic institution it does qualify as “certification”, a box ticked to indicate that all staff have received the same information about how to teach the children in your skate lesson or a dance class; but this is a lot of money to spend on ticking a box.

The City would appear to be making a significant investment in training staff and raising their standards of “quality assurance.” The choice to train all part-time staff, regardless of specific duties, is puzzling, but is perhaps part of a broader plan to make High Five training a condition of employment, so that subsequent job applicants have the training as a job requirement for which they personally pay.

The actual material, the Principles of Healthy Child Development and attendant activities and examples, was sound and the training lines up with current best practices for teaching children, but these are principles best taught in practice. Unless you are actively teaching, I can’t imagine this training staying with you.

One city staff described it as eight hours of being told “listen to the kids, listen to the kids”. As a (former) professional child care worker, I would argue that it was somewhat more sophisticated than that, but certainly outside of any teaching context the High Five program would feel that reductive.

There were many people in my session who were not directly responsible for children, and who expressed puzzlement (informally, not to the trainer) about why they were there. This is the oddest part of the City’s approach.

Because these staff have no immediate context in which to practice the instruction it is a waste of staff time and City money, and it’s unimaginable that they will remember it if they are someday switched over to a teaching position.

Parks Forestry and Recreation relies heavily on part time and temporary staff, young people looking for work as they study and train to go on to do something else. The Recreation division has approximately 8000 employees running programs across the city; these are frequently young people hired to work at their local community centre, for an hourly, usually minimum wage. They often have a second job, school obligations, and a tenuous connection to their employer.

As such, it is nominally impressive that the City is (for now) willing to spend this money on a fairly transient employee designation.

If only it translated into something more meaningful.

If the City is genuinely concerned about the quality of instruction in their children’s programming, they could spend this money on more effective and focussed training for the employees working directly with children.

In my experience this is an example of a chronic and larger issue with training and staff engagement in Recreation. Although staff were paid for the High Five training hours, they are not paid for the time spent reading the 85-page Recreation Workers’ handbook, filled with rules they are expected to follow. Asking these employees to read training information while at home is unfair, but the City didn’t appear to have another suggestion, like paying for their time.

Although part-time Recreation staff have virtually no access to computers during work time the City decided to use the web as their main communication regarding High Five since "[the internet is] quick to use and available at no cost." Since part-time staff don't have access to computers during worktime nor to the city intranet, staff leads were encouraged to send High Five emails to personal email addresses.

I had a similar experience in a day long training as a “location supervisor”. Again, we were paid for a day of “training” and everyone I was there with was engaged and ready to learn. But in the interests of time (in these sessions the trainers always say “I know you guys want to get out of here”) we sailed through material and skimmed over policies, with frequent iteration that we should read policies more fully at home. On our time, of course.

It has taken me a little too long to realize that the trainers aren’t being thoughtful at getting us out early, they are trying to save money. After the supervisors training, as I unlocked my bike, I overheard two participants saying they would have much preferred to be there longer and actually learned something. In this case we were nominally responsible for staff as well as children and dealing with issues like workplace safety and being sent home to read the manual did not feel like being readied for the position.

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