The Yukon teachers' union and the government failed to reach an agreement after two days of mediation at the beginning of the week.

Talks between the Yukon Teachers' Association (YTA) and the Public Service Commission broke down last September over wage demands and classroom composition.

Following further dialogue Monday and Tuesday, negotiations have officially reached a deadlock.

"The mediator will go back to the Yukon Teachers' Labour Relation Board in Ottawa and make a report ... that an impasse exists,” union president Katherine Mackwood told the Star Wednesday afternoon.

"From there, we will have a week to decide whether we will be going to arbitration or conciliation.”

The YTA's 750 members will have to decide whether to seek a binding settlement (arbitration), or go the route of conciliation – a deal emanating from here would require ratification from the YTA's membership, or could lead to strike action.

"We're not even looking at (a strike) right now,” Mackwood said.

The only time union members have withdrawn their services occurred in the early 2000s, on a rotational basis.

The teachers' union president said "some progress” was made on some matters, "our two outstanding major issues, working and learning conditions and classroom composition.”

But the sides could not reach an agreement on a financial package, Mackwood confirmed.

Teachers are seeking a nine-per-cent wage hike over two years, a demand the Public Service Commission is not willing to meet.

Last September, Public Service Commissioner Pat Daws declared the two parties "were not in the same settlement zones.”

Following the mediation failure, neither side would confirm how close, if at all, the sides were to achieving a deal on pay increases.

"As we said in the press release, we wouldn't be releasing any information regarding the mediation,” Daws told the Star this morning.

Educators in the territory have been without a collective agreement since June 30, 2009.

Already they are among the highest-paid in Canada, as the starting wage for a teacher in the Yukon is $57,398 annually. That is nearly $20,000 more than one would earn as a first-time teacher in British Columbia.

For the current 2009-2010 fiscal year, wages paid to teachers, education assistants, tutors, native language instructors and substitute teachers exceeded $61.5 million, which represents a four-per-cent increase over 2008-2009.

On top of salary demands, the teachers' union wants concerns over classroom composition addressed.

Last September, Mackwood told the Star that teachers are often tasked to do too much, and the status quo is contributing to dismal graduation rates Auditor General Sheila Fraser outlined in a January 2009 report.

"If you only have a certain amount of support in that class, i.e., one teacher, the individuals who need the support aren't getting it and neither are the other students,” said Mackwood.

Teachers are typically faced with class sizes of 23 to 24 students; upwards of 20 per cent of whom have learning or behaviour disabilities.

But Daws downplayed the union's opinion that it was forced to negotiate more manageable classroom scenarios.

"One of the things that's important to us is class contact time – the amount of time that there's teachers with the students – which improves the ultimate results,” Daws said last September, responding to Mackwood's claims.

Daws added that classrooms in the Yukon are among the smallest in Canada, with the average student-to-teacher ration of 10-to-one.

And according to Fraser's report, graduation rates in the territory are among the worst in Canada, with only 40 per cent of first nations students earning their Grade 12 diploma and just 58 per cent of all Yukon students reaching that milestone.