One of the great challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has been planning for a return to school.
This is obviously not just a Saskatchewan thing. This is an issue in every province and territory in the country, for the governments, the school boards and the individual schools. And most jurisdictions have been retooling their plans as the start of the school year approaches.
But in Saskatchewan, it seems like there’s been a lot of changes, modifications and spin.
When the province unveilled its back to school plan earlier this summer, it was panned in a lot of circles. Not just by opposition New Democratic Party and the unions who side with the party, but by average citizens living in rural communities who tend to vote Sask. Party en masse.
In the days after the initial plan was released, the government was issuing a news release almost every day, trying to explain individual components in a move that likely came across as spin doctoring to a lot of people.
And now they’ve released an amended plan that shuffles a lot of responsibility with the school divisions, which isn’t exactly winning people over.
No matter what the government does on this front, they’re not going to make everybody happy. In fact, it’s unlikely that you’ll have a plan in which someone will agree with every point.
You’re going to have contention with masks, class sizes, lunch service, extracurricular activities, entering and exiting classrooms, school bus routes.
And there are so many issues that have to be resolved. How do you provide education to special needs students and those who require extra attention? How do you ensure that students who are immune-compromised get the education that they need and deserve?
This is going to be a very fluid situation. There’s likely going to be a lot of changes happening between now and the start of the school year on Sept. 8, and throughout the school year.
The government, though, likely could have done a better job with its initial plan, so that it wouldn’t have had to be amended so much in the first place.
People aren’t happy that the government has offloaded a lot of responsibility to the school divisions, although there is some justification for it. Not all divisions in the province are in areas that have been as hard-hit as others.
We’re lucky in the southeast. We’ve had 11 diagnosed cases of COVID-19 in the 5 1/2 months since the virus was first diagnosed in this province. Only a couple of regions have had fewer cases; they’re in the far north.
But other regions have had a much higher caseload, and their school divisions need to be mindful when they make their back to school plans.
If we see a surge in the southeast that forces changes to the schools, that shouldn’t force changes to operations in other school divisions.
And if there’s a surge in multiple areas of the province, like we saw in Saskatchewan earlier this summer, that shouldn’t mean other divisions should have to change their protocols.
Kids need to be in classes this fall. The online and virtual classes that we saw in the final three months of the school year were great so that children were learning something, and so that they had some interaction with their teachers. And it’s great that the technology has advanced to the point where online learning is possible.
But it wasn’t the same as actually being there in the classroom for six hours a day and having homework each night.
And they obviously missed out on extracurricular activities and school sports and clubs and all of the other great things that enrich the school experience.
A full year outside of the classroom would be very detrimental for children.
You hope they’ll be able to get a full school year in. You definitely hope that at some point during the school year, a vaccine will be found for COVID-19, that it will be mobilized so that we can return to business as normal.
But there also needs to be all sorts of plans in place in case we have a surge in COVID-19 cases in this province.
