In less than two weeks, teachers, school administrators and staff members will be back in school as they get ready to fully implement the province’s back-to-school plan in these COVID-19 times. Students will return a few days later.
On Aug. 26, families and students got a better look at what school will look like in Whistler. Like several other school districts, ours will implement a quarter system in our high school where students will take two courses a day (read two teachers), for a period of about 10 weeks, remaining at school for the whole day. (This will not change the school year and its breaks in any significant way.) Students will be mostly with the same group of learners all day.
According to the province, people in a learning group don’t need to stay two metres apart at all times but they must limit physical contact and touching. Again, masks are mandatory for communal areas or where physical distancing can’t be achieved outside the cohort.
However, there will be times when classes, likely electives, will put students from different cohorts together and in that instance, the two cohorts must physically distance in the classroom and masks may be necessary.
Whistler’s Grades 8 and 9 will continue to follow a middle school pattern as before with literacy and numeracy being taught the entire school year through the quarter system.
There’s little doubt this quarter system will challenge Whistler students who are part of high-performance sports teams and it’s unclear right now how they will be impacted.
Classes will be the same size as last year. While the education ministry and provincial health have said student cohorts can be up to 120 students, this is more for tracking purposes in the event of COVID-19 cases.
The Sea to Sky District has also now launched a full online/distance learning school from Kindergarten to Grade 12. The district has run certain classes online in the past for Grades 10 to 12 but this ambitious program prompted by the pandemic is new for Sea to Sky.
One can only imagine that education leaders were looking at what everyone else provincially, nationally and internationally were doing to get ready for school.
B.C.’s ministry of health has treated the back-to-school issue much like it treated the reopening of restaurants and so on. It laid out the general parameters of best practices and then told school districts to come up with their own plans to implement the protocols and get back to the ministry. It is expected that school districts, including Sea to Sky, will have their plans to the ministry by the end of this week.
School district officials are aiming to normalize the school experience as much as possible, so elementary school will feel familiar except for things like staggered drop off-pick times, a lot more hygiene in school (how are all those kids going to wash their hands all the time with a limited number of sinks in the schools and minutes in the day?), and mask wearing in communal areas. Playgrounds are open, libraries will be open and classes can have P.E. in the gym.
In reality, the plan means that every family’s bubble is going from a maximum of 30 people—provincial health’s cutoff for Phase 2 of the B.C. reopening plan for COVID-19— to hundreds when you consider that each student and teacher has their own bubble!
I don’t have a solution, so it’s difficult to criticize the plan. Nor can we escape the reality that COVID in all its mutations is here to stay and it looks like we can get it multiple times. We simply can’t stop the world and education for the virus.
But every single family and teacher needs to choose the path that works for them. A family or teacher with no health conditions in those they love and who are fit and healthy may embrace the start of school and be ready to get to it while a teacher or family with live-in grandparents, or who are immunocompromised or have other health issues might be forced to choose to stay home from school.
And that staying home can come with significant challenges. Online/distance learning programs are a weak stand-in for the experience of school. And homeschooling means that one parent has to be the teacher and that keeps them out of the workforce—the trickle-down economics of these decisions will impact the whole country.
The province has given money to school districts to increase the capacity to clean and to look at improving ventilation in the schools—works underway in Sea to Sky with cleaning now taking place during the day as well.
Every parent and anyone associated with the school will have to do a health check every day before going into the schools. A child or teacher displaying any symptoms must stay home. Do we have enough substitute teachers for those who get sick and do we want teachers moving from school to school filling in, even if they must wear masks? If a COVID test comes back positive, then everyone the infected person has been in touch with has to self-isolate. That could mean an entire cohort has to pivot to full online learning.
Will there be bumps along the way this year? Absolutely. Parents need support and transparency to navigate what is best for their kids. Check your school website often, ask questions, check the district website (sd48seatosky.org) and for goodness sake, if you haven’t registered for school yet… do it now.
