Gatineau schools expected to ring bell May 11, but parents hear alarm bells
Many restrictions remain, yet province’s youngest students are allowed to mingle?
In Ottawa, we’ve locked down most of the labour force, shut every school; we’re ticketing people who linger in parks, cancelling major festivals in July and letting the old die without their families.
And in the Outaouais? They’re opening elementary schools on May 11, asking teachers to show up for advance work in five days (May 4) and resuming school bus service for children as young as five.
It is against this broader backdrop of pandemic anxiety that many parents in Gatineau and West Quebec are saying they will not send their children to school when the elementary system opens for voluntary attendance in about 11 days.
Too early, they say. Too risky to use the children, the teachers, as experimental sentinels in the battle against COVID-19, which has killed more than 1,700 in Quebec — and rising — the highest provincial number in Canada.
Amanda Degrace lives outside Cantley and sends two children to Chelsea Elementary School, with a third due to start kindergarten in the fall. She will not be putting her children on the bus for the 30-minute ride to school on May 11, or any other day for the rest of the academic year.
“We live 10 minutes away from the ByWard Market and, legally, I’m not allowed to drive into Ottawa. I’m not allowed to leave the Gatineau area to go grocery shopping 45 minutes away,” she said Wednesday, pointing to bridge closures and inter-regional travel restrictions.
“But I’m expected to possibly send my children to school?”
She believes there is still a health risk for the students and thinks the early opening places a heavy burden on teachers and staff in the school, which has about 300 children from kindergarten to Grade 6.
“I don’t feel we have flattened the (pandemic) curve, so that is very alarming, as a parent.”
She sympathizes with teachers, who are being asked to maintain a physical distance between the students, and with bus drivers, who are supposed to keep the kids separated inside the vehicle.
“Everyone who has children knows it is almost impossible to keep them six feet apart from each other.”
The Quebec government has announced that normal life in the province will begin to resume with resumption of routines for about a million children, including about 350,000 in daycare.
The Western Quebec School Board has about 30 English schools in its portfolio and teachers are represented by the Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers, which has 8,000 members.
President Heidi Yetman said the association was recommending a restart of classes in the fall and adds she was “blown out of the water” by the announcement from Premier François Legault this week.
“I think the biggest problem here is we have no plan. There’s no protocols.”
There is no personal protective equipment (masks, shields) for teachers and no guidance about what happens if a teacher, support worker, student or bus driver gets COVID-19.
One of the first areas to clear up, she added, was which teachers would be exempt for an early return to work, such as those over 60, or pregnant, or with underlying health conditions.
She’s worried, too, the schools will be running glorified daycares because the 15-student rule may mean pupils are given different teachers in a group of different classmates, and for a small number of weeks. But, more broadly, she doesn’t see Quebec as ready to open its education system.
“(Provinces) around us have fewer cases than us and they’re not even thinking about opening. Our numbers are frightening.” (Ontario has shut public schools until at least May 31.)
Blair Burchill has three daughters who attend Lord Aylmer Elementary School, which has about 670 students on two campuses on Frank Robinson Road in Aylmer.
He and the girls’ mother have decided not to send them back on May 11.
“We both think that it’s too soon. It just feels like the province is not on top of this situation yet. Feels too rushed.”
Near his home, he can see joggers and walkers and cyclists out in droves during the warm weather. With infection numbers still high in Quebec (but relatively lower in the Outaouais), he wonders if an early return to school and regular economic activity will only cause another spike.
“It feels like we’re ripe for a second wave of infection.”
Quebec high schools, meanwhile, will not reopen until the fall, which left Burchill puzzled.
This, indeed, will be a tough sell in the National Capital Region, where lives, families and labours are intertwined.
Public servants living in Gatineau, after all, are forbidden to step foot in their federal offices — and will be for weeks — but their six-year-olds can merrily toddle off to school to join hundreds of others in confined spaces, and bring home what exactly?