Parents furious about hybrid high school plan

Some Ottawa parents are furious to learn that secondary students returning to classes at school this fall will still end up receiving most of their instruction online.

The province’s plan for hybrid schooling in high schools calls for students to have “in person” instruction for half the time and spend the remainder studying online at home.

But the plans released by both of

Ottawa’s English language school boards call for students to spend only 25 per cent of their instruction time in class at schools, which would only be open in the mornings.

“I feel duped,” said parent Heather Richardson, whose daughter is heading to Grade 9 at Canterbury High School.

“I’m really shocked at the lack of transparency. This information was only divulged literally days before parents have to fill out the form and make a decision.”

On Wednesday, the board extended the deadline to midnight on Aug. 16 — Sunday — for parents to decide whether their children will go back to classes at school or study full-time online at home.

Mark Fisher, a trustee at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, said he was “taken aback and extremely surprised” when the high school schedule was released Tuesday night.

He thought the hybrid model meant high school students would be in school buildings half the time. “Wow, this is nothing like what we’ve been discussing as a board,” he said.

It’s not a school reopening plan, said Fisher. “It’s an online learning plan.”

Fisher said 16,000 people have viewed his Facebook post on the issue, and he’s hearing from angry parents.

Some of the province’s larger school boards have released similar schedules, he said. The larger school boards, including all four that serve Ottawa, have been directed by the province to offer hybrid schooling that blends inschool classes with online learning. Other boards, mainly in rural areas, will open to regular, fivedays-a-week classes.

When parents at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board were told about their options, the board said high school students would attend school two days in one week and three days the next week, for a total of five days over a 10-day period.

Fisher said he would be surprised if a single parent in Ottawa interpreted the word “day” to mean “half day.”

In the sample schedule released by both Ottawa English boards, students would attend class from 9 to 11:30 a.m., then go home. The school day would resume at 12:25 at home, where students would spend 75 minutes working independently online, followed by 75 minutes of “real-time learning online with a classroom teacher.” That could mean, for instance, a video conference.

How does that all add up? Over the course of two weeks, of the total 3,000 minutes of instructional time, 750 minutes would be at school, or 25 per cent.

And does that meet the provincial directive that hybrid schooling include “in person attendance for at least 50 per cent of instructional days?” It probably hinges on the interpretation of the words “in-person attendance.”

While many parents assumed that “in person” meant in school, apparently some school boards are interpreting the phrase to mean students are “in person” at home when attending a “live” session with a teacher.

To add to the confusion, one parent who wrote to Premier Doug Ford about the issue received a reply that used another terminology. The email said students would “alternate between attending in-person and online, with at least half of the time in-class.”

Parent Geri Moss-Norbury, whose son is going to Grade 11 at Lisgar Collegiate, said the scheduling news is infuriating. She said she has sympathy and respect for Ottawa school board staff trying to make major organizational changes with ever-shifting directives from the Ministry of Education.

But parents are left confused and uncertain, she said.

She had decided to send her son to school, but now she doesn’t know if it’s worth the potential exposure to the virus for only 2.5 hours of instruction.

Some students who travel distances to get to school will have trouble getting home in time to start their afternoon online work, she said.

She and her husband, who both work full-time, had planned to drive their son to school in the morning and pick him up at 3:30 because they would prefer he doesn’t take public transit during the pandemic.

Now they will be faced with doing a pickup in the middle of the day, she said.

Other parents are upset that a greater proportion of their child’s school day will be spent online than they expected. Richardson said her daughter did not do well during emergency online schooling last spring, which she called “atrocious.”

Spending 75 per cent of her school day online is “not going to be good” for her daughter, she said.

Students need to be in class with peers and teachers to build relationships, she said.

The patchwork of schedules emerging in high schools across the province is also unfair to students, said both parents.

Ottawa students are at a disadvantage compared with some other boards that have managed to offer hybrid schedules with half the time spent in school, said Moss-Norbury.

The school board said in a statement that it had to abandon its original hybrid scheduling plans for high schools when it received new directives from the Ministry of Education on July 31.

“Working collaboratively with principals, federations and key district staff, the OCDSB and (Ottawa Catholic School Board) jointly determined that this approach was the best balance between meeting the needs of students and complying with the expectations of the ministry and public health.”

The current proposal has several advantages over other possible options, said the statement, including more teacher contact time. It also “more easily accommodates keeping those students who opt for fully remote learning on class lists in their home schools and in contact with their teachers.”

Meanwhile, Ottawa’s two French-language school boards are waiting for a response from the Ministry of Education to their request to open some of their high schools full-time. Both boards have been designated for hybrid schooling. jmiller@postmedia.com