I, too, am confused about plans for school
Things are slowly starting to open up again in the GTA and, while I’ve been enjoying patio visits with friends, I’m also having the same conversation everywhere I go: Are you sending your kids back to school? Will you be returning to the classroom in September? What’s going on?
These conversations fill me with anxiety. I’m not talking about the usual pre-September anxiety that all teachers face before the start of a new school year. This year, my anxiety has taken a darker turn, as Ontario prepares to open schools for the first time since COVID-19 forced the unprecedented closing of, well, everything, nearly six months ago. Stories like the one reported by Global TV’s Travis Dhanraj offering education workers free will and health-care powers of attorney documents for the month of August don’t help.
Ontario’s Conservative Ford government has revealed its plans for a #SafeSeptember, to widespread criticism. While masking will be mandatory for Grade 4 and above, and there will be cleaning protocols and cohorting in every school, there are stark differences between grade levels. Elementary school kids will head back to unreduced classes, with full days of in-person learning. High school students will have a completely revamped schedule: in-person schooling for only 2.5 hours on alternate days, with 15 students per class. Most learning will still happen online.
Under this plan, my 15-yearold son will spend most of his time learning at home, while my 12-year-old son will be expected to trudge back to class with his new mask collection and a gallon of hand sanitizer the only concessions to our collective changed reality.
I’ve been a teacher for more than 16 years — teaching high school English and science — and one of the requirements for this career is being able to think on your feet and adapt to change quickly. Yet this situation has me feeling overwhelmed. My usual first-dayof-school worries have been replaced by a gnawing anxiety, one shared by my education colleagues.
In most discussions about reopening schools, teachers, support staff and administrators are rarely mentioned. Instead, the focus is on students and the chance of kids getting sick. Yet when schools first shut down, the reasoning was that schools were vectors for community transmission. The number of new COVID-19 cases are under control in Canada right now, thanks to our collective vigilance, but reopening schools is the next big step that we as a society are taking — it’s basically “Stage 4” without the fanfare — and the risks will largely be carried by the adults in each school.
At this point in the summer, three weeks before schools are scheduled to reopen and two weeks before teachers are expected to report for mandatory, in-person PD days, I still have no idea how or when I will be teaching. There are simply too many unknowns, each with an uncertain and possibly dangerous outcome. Which means that instead of thinking about normal teacher things, such as lesson plans or what my classes will be like, I’m wondering how I will be able to teach effectively, while also keeping myself and my family safe.
These questions should have been answered much earlier in the summer. As a teacher, I will be expected to implement whatever the government, and by extension the school boards, decide. So it is hard to believe that the confusing “sample schedules” posted on board websites, along with plans for reopening, remain at the tentative phase in mid-August. Worse, different school boards have devised vastly different plans, with seemingly little consultation with each other, as they scramble to implement what the Ford government has demanded. All of which has left me feeling powerless, and deeply disappointed with how the reopening of schools has been managed so far.
As someone who will be on the front lines in a few short weeks, I’m left to wait and see what happens next. This has been an exercise in frustration and has led me to wonder what my life outside of school will look like.
Will I be able to safely visit my parents once I’ve returned to work? Could my children catch this deadly virus and pass it on to immune-compromised family members without even realizing? Should I update my will? Maybe, possibly, definitely.
And yet, I do want schools to open. Kids need structure; parents need a break. We all want things to return to the way they were, before we ever heard of COVID-19. Schools play an intrinsic role in our society; they represent a sense of normal. Except things aren’t back to normal, not quite yet.
In the meantime, and for the sake of my own mental health, I’ve decided to make the most of each day. While I’m bracing for the uncertainty of the upcoming school year, I’m also going on bike rides with my kids, visiting my parents, catching up with friends, relishing the summer heat and trying to make the most of this exceptionally peculiar summer while I still can.