Set pod plans aside and make school safe for all

If you’re a working parent in a pandemic, I get it. I am, too, and our time and energy are finite. Fall is looming and we have a lot to prepare.

But if your family has privilege, as mine does, and you’re planning a school pod, I have one giant plea. Put your pod aside for the moment. Redirect your time and energy into pressuring the Ontario government to make in-person school safe for all students.

Catching up with your pod planning later will be fine. But letting days and weeks tick by without a viable school reopening plan is a slow train wreck in the making for all of us.

We need the Ontario government to mandate smaller class sizes now.

Pulling your child to make room for others won’t work. Class size will keep springing back up to the maximum, as mandated by the government. Public pressure is the only way to protect Ontario kids by capping class size at 15 students or less, as per public health recommendations.

The current Ontario plan for school reopening is already a failure in many ways. These are our options:

Option one: Parents are to send their elementary school-age children into a class of 30, in poorly ventilated classrooms, day after day, without masks from kindergarten through to Grade 3.

Option two: Privileged families can divest from public education, keeping their kids at home with the remote-learning option that further wedges the privileged from the poor.

This is a time when we should be looking back at data from the spring, to sit shamefully with the knowledge that lockdown worked for the rich but not the poor.

As the Star reported, Toronto Public Health data shows COVID is infecting racialized people from outer city neighbourhoods at a stunningly disproportionate rate.

I grew up in a working-class family in one of those higher-risk neighbourhoods. Today, my family and I have options. But regardless of where I live, I’m the same person who believes in the life-giving potential of public education.

If you believe in public education, too, you can see that these options do not represent true choice. It’s a trap. And I am furious that I am being put in this position.

We need to design back to school for the most vulnerable child from the most high-risk neighbourhoods. Keeping that child in mind is what will keep every child safe.

The government should be using bold thinking, informed by the outdoor classrooms of the past (yes, schools operated for decades without a single building, right here in Toronto) to get this generation of children through this pandemic with a minimum of lasting harm.

Instead, Premier Doug Ford and Education Minister Stephen Lecce are downloading the burden of deciding the future of public education, and its inequities, to individual families. This is wildly unfair.

So put down your pod plan. It can wait. Pick up your phone to call the premier and minister of education. If you care about the democratizing, economy-boosting, care-giving role that public education plays for the entire population, this is your time to tell the Ontario government that you want smaller class sizes now and safe schools for every child.