Unofficial results showed a contract offer for Ontario college teachers was approved by 51.25 per cent of those who voted. (CBC)

Ontario community college teachers have approved a new collective agreement and will not be going on strike, the Ontario Labour Relations Board confirmed Wednesday afternoon.

"[The students] can set aside their anxiety, concentrate on their studies, and it's full steam ahead with classes," said Don Sinclair, a member of the colleges' negotiating team.

The board held an official count of the teachers' votes on the latest contract offer from Ontario's 24 colleges. The proposal won 51.45 per cent of the vote.

"We are pleased that faculty saw this offer as fair and reasonable and one that they could accept," said Dr. Rachael Donovan, chair of the colleges' bargaining team. "We will now have a collective agreement in place and we have avoided a strike. This result is good news for our students, our faculty and our communities."

If faculty had rejected the offer, a strike could have gone ahead colleges across the province, affecting more than 200,000 full-time students.

About 9,000 college teachers, counsellors and librarians represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union were eligible to vote Feb. 10. Unofficial results showed the contract passed with 51.25 per cent of the vote — a margin of just 210 ballots among 8,361.

However, that count did not include more than 350 mail-in ballots as well as an extra 141 ballots that were set aside because the voters were not on the voters' list. Many of those ballots were expected to be counted in the official results Wednesday. A union member might not have appeared on the voters' list if he or she voted at a different college from the one where he or she works most of the time.

The vote on what the colleges called their final offer was held by the labour board after a request from the College Compensation and Appointments Council, the provincial agency that bargains on behalf of the colleges.

The offer contains a salary increase of 5.9 per cent and moves the max salary to more than $102,000 by Sept. 1, 2011.

The union recommended rejecting the offer, saying it did not do enough to address issues of workload and academic freedom.