The Sea to Sky School District (SD48) laid out its plans to the school board for educating and caring for its students during the COVID-19 pandemic during its regularly scheduled meeting Wed., April 8, on Zoom.
One example of the lengths local educators are going to, heard the board, was a principal went to a student's home in the evening, sat outside a glass door, and, through it, taught a student and the parents how to use a specific electronic device.
"Whether we're reading on doorsteps and helping through the door or [Educational Assistants (EA)] are calling and walking families through how to use the devices with the child, eventually we'll get to the place where we have a significant plan for each child," said Lisa McCullough, superintendent for the district.
SD48 is following four guiding principles to ensure all students have their needs met, and staff and students are in a healthy environment. In priority order, they include: maintaining a healthy and safe environment for all students, families, and employees; providing services to children of essential workers; supporting vulnerable students who may need special assistance, and providing continuity of educational opportunities for all students.
Maintaining a healthy and safe environment
On a practical level, the district has stepped up custodial services at all schools for "a pandemic-level of cleaning," said Ian Currie, director of operations at the district.
"We have daytime custodians, as well as the regular shift custodians, so the afternoon/evening shift as well, to do the extra, deep cleaning," he said. "We've installed signage, we have a number of things in place where we're getting the message out. We pushed information out to all the schools through our website, through our general emails to all the principals and vice principals ... we've set up a number of initiatives with respect to hours of operations."
On top of that, the number of spaces in the schools have been restricted, the district has purchased hand sanitizer from a Squamish distillery, and has procured proper gloves, as well as a few N95 masks.
Protocols have also been put in place to help students retrieve items they might still have at school. Some schools have escorted parents into the classroom and others have bagged up lockers and brought personal items outside for pick up.
Efforts are also underway to help staff, students, and families navigate mental-health concerns during this stressful time. Staff members filled out a wellness consideration survey and resources have been offered. Community support is listed on the district's COVID-19 website, and Whistler counsellor Greg McDonell last week put on an online webinar for parents and students about wellness planning.
Providing services to children of essential workers
While schools in the corridor are open for students whose parents have been deemed essential workers, "I want to be clear that this is not intended to be childcare," said McCullough. "We do not intend to become licensed child-care providers. This is a topic that started quite urgently to get childcare in place, but we're evolving quite quickly."
"We were the first district to get up and running on Monday (April 6), with support for our essential service workers. No family needed us Monday, but we were ready on Tuesday when they did."
By the meeting on Wednesday, 17 families in Squamish with 22 children were sending kids to school, along with three families in Whistler with five children, and five families in Pemberton with seven children.
"We're really here to support those who have no other options that need to get to work," said Phillip Clarke, director of instruction with the district.
"We've been staffing with ... substitute teachers and we're open from 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.—[that] is the latest we've had to go. The goal is to meet that 12-hour shift that service workers typically do."
The district is the only childcare provider currently in Pemberton and Whistler, but work is underway to collaborate with Kids on the Go in the latter community, he added.
"The BC Centre for Disease Control has been updating us regularly with health and safety information and the most current information we have about caring for kids," Clarke said. "Overall, children have very low infection rates, estimated between one to five per cent world wide. The majority of cases in children are the result of household transmission by droplets spread by another family member with symptoms. Children infected by the virus develop milder symptoms, if any, and very few become critically ill ... Unlike adults, the rates of transmission are unknown, but there's no documented evidence of child-to-adult transmission. There are no documented cases of children bringing an infection into the home from school."
So far, the district has been taking on students whose parents are labelled by the province as tier one (including health-care workers and emergency responders) and tier two essential workers. "Now when we move onto tier three, these become people like our teachers who are trying to provide continuity of learning, but have young children at home, and so it promises to create a situation for us where an enormous number of children will need Phil's attention on providing the learning care for their child during the day," McCullough said. "We are about to enter another zone that will be tricky."
Supporting vulnerable students
Classroom teachers are considered the "first line of support" for vulnerable children, Clarke said.
They're also collaborating with support teachers and learning-service teachers to figure out how to deliver materials and instruction. If extra support is needed, "we have to figure out what that is," he said. "Maybe it's spending an extra 15 minutes on the phone or on a video chat with that family to make sure they have the right app up and running so they can effectively get their visual schedules."
Eventually, if needed, an EA might be spending more time with a child. "It's just triaging to see and figure out what the best method of approach is going to be in order to do that," he said.
Part of the effort also includes working with community partners like counsellors or occupational therapists. "Everyone is up and running; we're just looking at doing it a different way," Clarke said.
Moving forward, McCullough added, students with greater needs who can't be fully helped online or over the phone might start attending school while social distancing as much as possible.
The district has also reached out to every Indigenous student, some in remote communities where online connections might be an issue, as well. For those families, a digital-needs assessment survey was conducted.
"We proceeded to support our ISW [Indigenous support workers] with six tasks that they can do during the day—a weekly report, like a book or a schedule, so they had meaningful work to do, not only [to] check in with their community, [but also to] check in with their principal, check in with their nation, to update contact information to work on something creative that they could share with their students and families through Google Hangout or Google Classroom, and make sure they're sending one communication to every school for teachers to pick up and send out to students in the school," said Susan Leslie, district principal of Aboriginal Education.
Food and school-lunch distribution also began in Pemberton and its surrounding communities last week, she added. (For more on that, see page 20.)
Providing continuity of educational opportunities
Ensuring students are still learning is also a Ministry priority, and many teachers in the district were working on it concurrently with other priorities, McCullough said.
"Our way of being in [the district] was to put our social-emotional connection ahead of everything else, so the first plan was to make that social-emotional connection and say, 'Hey, is there anything you need? What do I need to know? Here are resources for you,'" she added.
For students from kindergarten to Grade 3, the focus for the remainder of the year will be on "foundational skills" like literacy and numeracy. That continues for Grades 4 to 9. At both levels, individual teachers will deliver instruction in different ways.
"We know there's quite a continuum out there," said Paul Lorette, assistant superintendent. "Some families, after an hour or two of work, that might be enough and that's what they can manage. Other families may be looking for a full-on day of activity and a schedule to try and have that sense of routine and normalcy. What we're trying to provide are some frameworks that are flexible so that families can adapt and use what they need."
The messaging, meanwhile, for students in high school: "Every student on track to graduate, will graduate," said Chris Nicholson, assistant superintendent.
"There will be support for those students who have been stumbling to get the support they need to make it through. Our teachers know they're focused on essential learnings for each of their courses, so that there are access points for every student to be engaged as well as opportunities for those that want to go further, to do so."
The grad assessments for Grades 10 and 11 have been postponed while the only assessment for the Grade 12s is the Grade 10 numeracy assessment that most have completed, he added. There will be opportunities for those who haven't completed that to do so.
More information on all of this can be found at sd48seatosky.org/covid-19-information.
