Postponing start of classes is the right thing to do
Delay the opening of schools. It is a little silly that it’s come to this, but there’s nothing that says we have to start school on time. Give it some time.
Yes, school’s been out for more than summer. But we’ve all had the dream, right? The school dream? I’m in the hallway, I’m late for class, I forgot the assignment, I didn’t wear pants. Later in life it might evolve to the university dream, where you forgot to drop the class you never attended. Some people have them for decades after graduation, and that pure anxiety endures. School dreams, forever.
Well, that’s what Ontario feels like right now. On Thursday, provincial Education Minister Stephen Lecce delivered yet another version of the school reopening plan. He primarily announced that school boards can now access a total of $500 million in reserve funds to hire extra staff, and to lease space in order to reduce class sizes and ensure social distancing.
And there’s a total of $50 million to upgrade HVAC ventilation systems.
Which means three-and-a-half weeks to remake a lot of schools. Lecce first brushed off the idea that school openings could be delayed, though he said he was open to staggered starts over the first week. He said some school boards had already looked at leasing other spaces, and hiring more teachers, or upgrading ventilation systems in buildings that, at last check, were not always easy to upgrade. If you’ve ever seen how long it takes to make a school playground smaller and worse, you might be skeptical.
Evenly applied, $500 million is about $109,000 per each of the 4,600 schools in Ontario.
It will be case by case as to how many teachers, HVAC upgrades and facility rentals that produces. The Toronto District School Board’s projected cost to create full-time, 15-to-20-kid-per-class, enhanced-protocol schools in a prudent manner was at least $20 million.
So school boards are scrambling and some boards are skeptical that using reserves will lead to future vulnerability. And others weren’t on board, either.
In the hours before the announcement, the Ontario Principals’ Council had already called for smaller class sizes, caps of 15 kids per class in kindergarten, and for the opening of school to be delayed. And the four major teacher unions released a joint statement saying the plan failed to meet the requirements in the Ontario Occupational Health and Safety Act. The unions threatened a complaint to the Labour Relations Board, and demanded a meeting by Aug. 21.
Meanwhile, Toronto parents are getting confusing robocalls to gauge their intentions on a plan that keeps changing.
“You’ve got to come together. You’ve got to put your differences aside. You’ve got to make sure safety triumphs,” said Lecce, less than effectively.
School starts in less than four weeks, and it feels like everyone’s cramming. So why not delay it a week or two? You don’t have to open schools Sept. 8. Fair or not, nobody cares if Ontario has the best plan in the country, because their kids don’t go to school in Alberta. Trotting out Dr. David Williams to reassure parents is, based on his peerless noncommunication skills and blithe and ridiculous dismissal of all risk, not going to reassure parents. The entire economy is underpinned by child care, and child care requires public confidence, and if this was going really well, Stephen Lecce wouldn’t have to keep holding press conferences in mid-August to tell people how well it was going. Because parents are nervous, and everyone else should be, too. The science evolves: children, as it turns out, can get and transmit the virus effectively, even if they mercifully suffer it less, especially under the age of 10. But that means they can infect teachers, staff, parents, caregivers, and their social circles. And, yes, Ontario’s community transmission is blessedly low. The point is nobody wants schools, as they have in some jurisdictions, to drive outbreaks.
Meanwhile, parent advocacy groups, Toronto Public Health, Peel Public Health, and the Public Health Agency of Canada suggested smaller class sizes. The Sick Kids reports the province so widely lauded said, “smaller class sizes should be a priority strategy as it will aid physical distancing and reduce potential spread from any index case,” which the province ignored before the CEO of Sick Kids reiterated it.
Maybe this will result in smaller class sizes, which would be great. Although you know what might also help with that? Mandating smaller class sizes.
At best, it’s still a work in progress. Some well-off parents are taking this opportunity to create their own learning pods with paid-for teachers. Some parents are just keeping their kids home for remote learning.
(Full disclosure: My wife and I are keeping our kids home, for a few different health reasons in our family. We would like to send them, if we could know it was safe.)
All that means is that the kids most at risk are the kids of the people who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic already: parents who can’t work from home, who live in smaller spaces without the ability to isolate, new Canadians, racialized Canadians.
“The plan cannot end at the doors of the school,” says Dr. Michael Warner, the medical director of critical care at Michael Garron Hospital in East York, who has been an outspoken voice on this. “It has to make sure that when people leave the school, communities are protected from the school.”
This could have been so much easier. If Ontario had a coronavirus czar, a blue-ribbon panel of bureaucrats and scientists and educators and unions could have been convened in May. They could have taken time to craft a flexible, big-money plan, had it approved by a cabinet that valued schools above all, and everyone could have stood together at the press conference. Classrooms could have been expanded, extra staff hired, HVAC upgraded. And parents could, despite their frazzled nerves, feel more certainty about sending their children back to school in the safest possible environment.
Instead, the plan is new again, with a few weeks to go, and parents are freaking out like their kids just stole the family car. The test is coming. It’s a big one. Why not wait?