Educators, parents call for a delay on reopening

A growing chorus of voices is calling for delaying the start of the school year by up to a month.

The Ontario Principals’ Council released a statement Thursday recommending the start of the school year be delayed until Sept. 14 to allow staff time to train on matters such as PPE, outbreak management and tracing protocols.

The principals also recommended that the start of the school year also be staggered to Sept 18.

“This practice would be an effective way to welcome students back to a new normal in our schools,” said council president Ann Pace.

Carol Campbell, an associate professor of leadership and educational change at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, suggests pushing back the reopening date for a month.

Denmark was one of the first to reopen schools and took over a month. It started in a staggered way on April 15 with the youngest students. When it comes to reopening schools, Denmark is the best international example of success, said Campbell. On the negative side, Israel opened fast and had to close schools after cases of COVID-19 spiked.

Campbell was one of a group of Ontario academics and education advocates who released a paper titled A Gentle Return to School: Go Slow to Go Fast earlier this week.

The paper suggests a staggered or phased reopening means not all teachers would be required to be in the classroom in the early stages. Those who are not in the classroom could be helping students and parents prepare for the next phase of re-entering the classrooms and assessing students’ learning needs.

“We’re not the first education system to reopen. There’s evidence from around the world now,” said Campbell. “We should have been much further along in our planning.”

Trustee Sandra Schwartz, who represents Innes/Beacon Hill-Cyrville at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, said she has heard from a numerous parents who support delaying the school year. As the parent of a daughter going to Grade 8, she also feels the pressure of making a decision without enough information.

“I feel I’m being forced to put my child in a giant experiment.”

The local system has the ability at the local level to come up with creative solutions — using outdoor spaces, for example. “But to do it properly, we need more money and a little more time,” she said.

“There’s a whole ecosystem that has to shift and change in a few weeks. Maybe we need to seriously contemplate whether we need to take a step back and ask if we really need to open at the beginning of September.”

Meanwhile, four of Ontario’s largest education unions have said they’re prepared to go to the Ontario Labour Relations Board to determine whether the province has met its obligations to ensure that schools are safe workplaces.

Ruth Baumann, one of the co-authors of Go Slow to Go Fast, said teachers and school boards need to wade though a number of issues, ranging from figuring how many students will be in class and how many will be online to how to make bus transport safe. “If we just give people a lot of paper and tell them to read it and fling the doors open, it will be difficult,” warned Baumann, who spent over 40 years as an educator and is the former chair of the Ontario Ministry of Education’s curriculum council.

School boards will need extra time to figure out how to allocate their human resources. That means figuring out how many teachers can’t be assigned to faceto-face classrooms for medical reasons and reallocating them to other roles, such as supporting online learners, she said.

Meanwhile, teachers will need time to assess returning students in terms of both mental health and academics. And they will have to decide how to achieve their curriculum priorities.

“There has to be an actual conversation with every family and every child. For some kids, this time out may have been perfectly fine. But some might have found it quite traumatic,” said Baumann.

“There will be some who read a book every day and some who haven’t even picked up a book.”