BACK-TO-SCHOOL WORRIES
Teachers, parents express concerns
B.C. teachers spent the first half of this week planning for how students can safely return to classrooms in the coming days, a complex brainteaser given the province’s recent rise in coronavirus cases — especially among youth.
“We know physical distancing will be a challenge in some places. So it’s really important that we have these next couple of days to have students come in and get used to the classroom space, get used to seeing adults wearing PPE,” said Jody Polukoshko, third vice-president of the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers Association.
“There will be a large amount of time dedicated to health and safety, to managing handwashing routines, to staggered recesses and lunches in order to minimize contact, and also to ensure that students get the time that they need outdoors.”
And while teachers are excited to return to work, they remain worried, Polukoshko said, about several key items, including how to keep everyone safe inside classrooms that will essentially be filled with the same number of students as previous years.
“There are still more questions than answers,” she said.
On the other side of the Burrard Inlet, North Vancouver parent Diana Araya has decided not to let her daughter return to Grade 3 or her son to enter kindergarten this fall because her family has never expanded its social bubble. It just doesn’t make sense to her to expose her children now to a large group of students.
“We feel all our sacrifices will go in vain when our kids go back to their classrooms,” said Araya.
This will be one of the most unusual starts to a school year in B.C. history. Provincial and district administrators have scrambled to figure out how to get all students educated without violating health restrictions during this pandemic, but some of the 11th-hour decisions have left parents and teachers frustrated.
Araya opted for a temporary transition program, which requires parents to provide “regular educational support” at home, and doesn’t offer any district support for courses such as French Immersion. She must decide by December whether her kids will return to their classrooms, and wishes a more hybrid at-home and atschool (with smaller classes) option was available.
“We opted for the temporary transition program even though that is not really what we want. We are just buying time,” she said.
Polukoshko said classroom teachers in Vancouver have been told they need to provide support for these at-home learners, which she said isn’t feasible.
It’s unfair, she added, that the program doesn’t offer the full curriculum and is likely out of reach for most working parents.
She also said teachers are frustrated that classroom sizes haven’t been meaningfully reduced, and noted the learning cohorts of 60 kids for elementary and 120 for secondary are inconsistent with the provincial health officer’s message to keep a family’s social bubble small.
After attending her Grade 8 son’s orientation at his North Van secondary school on Wednesday, Gillian Behnke said she was determined to trust administrators and make the best of his return to class — although she still has concerns.
“I am nervous that they won’t be required to wear a mask or social distance in the classroom,” she said. “Once they are in their bubble they are not required to do either. And that causes me some anxiety given that the (COVID-19) numbers are going up.”
Behnke’s mother lives in a separate suite in the family home, so her son and Grade 6 daughter will reduce their interaction with their grandmother to avoid any chance of giving her the virus.
Schools have been required to pivot to reduce interaction between students, and most have adopted a quarter-mester system in which students take two courses over 10 weeks, then repeat this three more times.
Behnke’s son will take science and arts/drama until mid-November.
“They are jam-packing a full year of science curriculum into 10 weeks,” Behnke said.