Parents’ dilemma: is it safe to send children to class?
Decision time looms as officials scramble to get schools ready
Ontario has decided that elementary students can return to school five days a week and high schoolers can attend class either full or part-time, depending on where they live. But parents still face a difficult choice.
Should they send their kids back to school in September?
It’s not mandatory. Parents can opt to have their children learn online at home. But they will have to decide soon so administrators can organize schools that are being transformed because of the pandemic.
The province’s back-to-school plan includes a “bundle” of measures the government says will help keep two million Ontario children safe from COVID -19.
All staff and students in Grade 4 to 12 will wear masks. Desks will be spread apart — as much as possible — and students grouped into “cohort” bubbles. Frequently touched surfaces will be disinfected at least twice a day, hand washing will become an obsession and public health nurses will help both with screening to keep the virus out of schools and rapid testing, and tracing of contacts, if someone contracts COVID -19.
Many parents are still anxious. “I’m hearing parents who are very stressed,” says Ariel Troster, whose eight-year-old daughter Daphne attends Lady Evelyn Alternative. “It’s a very tough decision. Do they put their kid in and be terrified? Do they hold them back and continue to suffer at home?”
Troster said her first reaction to the plan was relief. “At least we are looking at full-time school.”
Daphne’s emergency home learning this spring during the lockdown did not go well, even though teachers tried their best, Troster said. “There was very little learning.”
Troster plans to send her daughter back to school confident it will be “relatively safe.” But Lady Evelyn is a small school where it will be easier to spread children out, and the building is fairly new — it even has air conditioning.
Other schools are crowded, making physical distancing problematic, said Troster. The school reopening plan is “just not good enough,” she concludes.
“We need to push harder to make parents feel that schools are truly safe for their children.”
Troster says she and her wife are also in the privileged position of having the option of keeping Daphne at home. Parents who face losing their jobs if they don’t head back to work don’t have much choice about whether their children will go back to school, she says.
The province has promised to spend $309 million on school reopening, including hiring more custodians, buying personal protective equipment and adding 500 public health nurses.
Glebe parent David McFall says his two children, Alistair, 12, and Gwenyth, 7, will go back to school at Glashan and Mutchmor public schools. “Definitely.”
McFall has personal experience with pandemic schooling. He’s the principal at Pierre Elliott Trudeau school in Gatineau, which along with other Quebec elementary schools opened for the last seven weeks of the school year last spring.
Teachers and parents were nervous, but the experiment was reassuring, says McFall.
In fact, some of the measures adopted for public health improved the educational experience, he said. Children spent significantly more time outside and teachers assigned to a classroom were given more leeway to decide the direction of the school day.
“It gave us the opportunity to rethink what our school day should look like.”
“The best part,” he laughs, “was getting rid of the bells.”
Teachers rose to the challenge of two-metre distancing, asking students to imagine their desks were islands and encouraging them to name their kingdoms and decorate them. However, Quebec classes were limited to 15 students last spring, and at McFalls’s school board the cap was only eight students. It will be quite a different challenge when elementary students — in Ontario and Quebec — head back to regular classes.
Still, McFall said he is confident that teachers and administrators will find ways to make it work.
School boards are allowed to establish opt-in times to prevent parents from repeatedly switching their children between in-class and online schooling.
The Ottawa Catholic School Board, for instance, had already sent a letter to parents asking them to indicate if they prefer online school and to commit to it for three months (September to November) for elementary students and a semester (September to January) for secondary students. The board will send a revised letter to parents next week, said a spokesperson.
The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board plans to send a letter to parents next week asking them to make a choice as quickly as possible.