Jeff Green | Aug 19, 2020


The return to school is complicated, and the true character of the experience will vary for every family, every classroom, and every school.

Schools are publicly funded, bureaucratic institutions. They are administered by employees of school boards, which approve every penny they spend, and all of the protocols they follow. The boards receive their marching orders from the Ministry of Education. And the school environment is unionised, wit different unions representing teachers, support staff and maintenance staff. On top of that, the local public health agency, is providing guidance, advice and oversight over the opening plans and ongoing operations for all institutions as they re-open.

All of this baggage makes school opening a different sort of animal than store or restaurant re-openings, which have been a feature of our collective lives over the spring and summer. There are similarities and differences in the way school opening and the openings of commercial businesses have played out.

The differences have to do with the amount of institutional effort involved in school openings as opposed to a restaurant or a store, and with the number of issues that need to be addressed. I took the opportunity to attend a special meeting of the Limestone District School Board online last Wednesday evening to see if I could get a handle on how the board is planning to handle the beginning of school in a couple of weeks. I was looking for some quick answers to some basic questions - How many kids per class? Can families opt in and out easily from online and in-school education? What will the school day look like?

It quickly became clear, as the meeting began, that answering any of these questions involves a lot of planning and a lot of thinking through details. I had to stop watching the meeting after about 75 minutes to do something else, but I left the feed on. Two hours later clicked back as I was closing some tabs on my browser and saw that the meeting was still going on. I watched for a bit longer. The meeting lasted so long because every supervisor at the board was reporting on a specific set of protocols that were under development by themselves or a working group they were representing, and the trustees were bringing their own and their constituent’s questions to the supervisors.

Between the meeting and the 30-page family reference guide that has been posted on the board website, it is clear that opening schools is an order of magnitude more complicated than a business re-opening. There is more at stake as well, as an outbreak in a school will have repercussions for an entire community.

The school re-opening is similar to others as well. The provincial decision to open up in-class education in September for all students was done via a short statement by the premier, accompanied by a document that barely sketched out how it was all supposed to work. The details were to be worked out by the school boards and the schools themselves.

This is how it has been since the start. When golf courses were allowed to open, in early May, course operators had not heard about it before the public did, and they did not receive any information from the province either. It was up to them to contact the local health unit, who were left to provide what guidance they could based on their understanding of Public Health guidelines and what kinds of exposures there are at golf courses.

In the end, the golf course operators scrambled to get everything in place in order to open, and then spent a few weeks fine tuning their procedures so they could offer a safe experience to their customers and continue to turn a profit.

In the recent case of restaurant re-openings, some restaurants jumped on the opportunity to open their dining rooms and some are waiting. All of the calculations about their own safety, safety of clients and sales potential were specific to the individual restaurant.

And even with all of the institutional underpinnings, individual schools are going to have to make changes over time when they open their doors. Each school has a different layout, a different mix of students, a different set of teachers. When it comes down to it, getting through the school day while keeping everyone safe and as happy as possible will be the number one priority of the schools as they re-open this fall. If that means student advancement is compromised, it is just another bit of fall our from the pandemic.

Talking to teachers and parents on a more or less random basis this week, I was struck by the range of attitudes towards returning to school. I talked to teachers who were concerned, teachers who were enthusiastic, parents who were sending kids back even though the were worried because they can’t afford to stay home with their kids, parents who were not sending their kids, parents who were letting their kids decide. None of the people that I talked to were acting out of fear, but they are faced with decisions that carry a certain amount of responsibility and they are aware of the risks that are involved, whichever way they decide to act.

They are buoyed by the sweet spot that we have all been in over the summer in this region, where apart for the nail salon related cases, stage 2 and 3 re-opening has not resulted in any outbreaks. While everyone hopes school re-openings will not result in cases, everyone, from the health unit to the schools to the parents, are ready for the possibility.

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