Return to school could spell disaster — why rush?

We should not be returning to school on June 1. Period.

Come hell or high water, the wheels of our provincial government are grinding toward reopening schools, making B.C. one of only two provinces mandating this for teachers before September.

Our school district senior team and school board, the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, our local union, my school administration and teachers are all powerless because these decisions have been made at the highest level. Who am I to resist?

Who I am is a teacher, one of thousands with deep and powerful connections with their students. I love and miss them all terribly.

I am also, along with my husband, recovering from confirmed cases of COVID-19. We are still recovering — to be sure, this is far worse than the flu. We contracted it March 9. Without knowing we were sick, in our most infectious asymptomatic period I continued to work full-time at my high school, and my husband, who is a teacher on call, worked at three different schools in two separate districts. That is how quickly and easily this virus could be spread in schools.

Our journey through the medical system was challenging, and there were alarming discrepancies in protocol between the two hospitals we had to visit.

I say this not to point fingers at the medical staff, who were doing their best at the time, but to illustrate that even our medical system is still feeling and experimenting its way through this pandemic. And they are far more prepared than almost any other institution, including education.

However, just because our provincial health team has done a great job in reducing new cases, that doesn’t mean an all-clear for other institutions to resume business as usual. The virus is still there waiting for an opening, and there are still daily outbreaks.

I also recognize the desire for schools to conduct “trial runs” before September, but what is the actual impetus behind the rush? Why can’t we see how things go with a gradual opening up of less population-dense services before we try our hand at schools? Where is the cost-benefit analysis of such a plan, when we are dealing with thousands of children’s lives?

How did we become a province that experiments with our children’s safety while the rest of the country (outside Quebec) has more cautiously deemed that it’s not worth the risk? As one teacher wrote on

Twitter, Dr. Bonnie Henry said to “double our bubbles” — but going back to school means that all of us go from a personal family circle, to hundreds, possibly thousands.

I’m one of the fortunate few as our six weeks of hell fighting off this virus has hopefully granted me some immunity (fingers crossed). But I am afraid for the subjects in this experiment: my students, colleagues, staff and administrators.

So many of my colleagues are young, have little ones at home, have underlying conditions, or are pregnant. The stress for kindergarten to Grade 12 educators and students to maintain hyper-vigilance makes no sense and will be debilitating.

Additionally, educators have already put in many hours to plan and deliver online remote learning, and we are finally getting some traction, with even our most reluctant learners. But now we all face another 90-degree turn, which means poor, inconsistent pedagogy.

We risk losing from school those kids who have trouble managing so much stress, anxiety and change.

Yes, there are parents who need their children in school. And children who need to be in school.

However, many of these children have already been supported, either in regular schools, or at the essential service worker hubs, which are fully operational and perfectly capable of expanding to accommodate the children of additional tiers of workers without opening every school. A more general return to school for staff and students holds the potential for a disaster.

Our first priority in education is to always ensure student safety. If a dangerous person is knocking on the door of our locked-down school, no educator would let them in. Why are we opening the doors now? The risk to children’s safety is not worth it.