This current moment in education.
Photo taken from GECDSB Board of Trustees Meeting on June 2nd 2020.
I feel you. I really do. I’m a parent of an incoming SK student, who desperately wants to be in class. I have parents with health concerns and compromised immune systems. I suffered from a bout of anxiety for the first 2 months of covid after my entire life was thrown upside down. I am a mother who semi-exited the workforce during covid in order to care for my daughter, and I desperately felt the impacts of this “she-cession.” I am trying to put my daughter at the center of this decision and as a result, am sending her back to school. I am not unlike any of you who are faced with tough decisions on little and ever-changing information with a great deal of uncertainty.
I’m also a Trustee and I thought I would weigh in and give some perspective from my vantage point, as I work through my own thoughts and make decisions in this environment.
Not many understand the role of a Trustee. I’ll be honest - I didn’t when I first started either and I am still learning on the go. We are a highly regulated elected official with the role of governance, meaning a clear “lane” to stay in, so to speak. We are governed by the Education Act, “a creature of the province,” as many have noted and on our own, we don’t have a lot of power. We have three main responsibilities: hiring and firing our Director of Education, creating and approving our Multi-Year Strategic Plan that governs their general actions, and approving our annual budget (of which roughly 80% is predetermined by salaries from collective agreements). Because of this last item, we do have leverage around capital priorities, and building projects, but we are prohibited from directing operations, or getting in the day-to-day weeds. I think that another vital role that we take on is that of advocacy, both for our constituents and our our communities in which we find ourselves, but that is not very clearly spelled out. However, having a discussion about the role of Trustees is not why I decided to write this blog.
I wanted to talk about the current moment in which we find ourselves in our education system.
I really believe in the value of public education in society. As a lifelong student myself, I see the tremendous potential for educators of all types to make real and lasting differences with our young people. While I am not formally a teacher, I aspire to be an educator, and I have a deep respect and admiration for those in our community who pour their heart and soul into teaching. Other important people, like our administrators, our support staff, and behind the scenes staff, such as facilities services and IT professionals, also play critical roles in ensuring a consistent, high quality, and safe learning experience. I believe that schools are the heart of our cities - both the physical buildings themselves and the communities they create. When they close - both temporarily and long-term - it devastates our neighbourhoods. We can point to several examples of that happening in Windsor. I see the inequality they can perpetuate. Sometimes it plays out geographically, racially, differently-abled, and yes, still along gendered lines, despite our best intentions. That vantage point is what motivates me to ensure that we look at our policy decisions from a lens of equity. But I digress; I am not here to get into the intersection of schools and urbanism (as I am not an expert in this area either!). We have a more pressing issue at hand.
On September 8th, the province has decided on a full return to school in the conventional way for elementary and an adaptive/modified schedule for secondary students, although we are now allowed to have a staggered reopening. As per direction from the province, the GECDSB Reopening plan can be found here. There is a lot that can be said about it - and there was at our August 11th Board meeting - and yet we still find ourselves with significant concerns around class sizes, cohorting and transportation. We had a follow up meeting on August 19th to receive further updates in order to try to gain further clarification about changes to the school year, as well as put additional resources to support lower class sizes in schools. While we didn’t get to everything between these two meetings, there were many questions on masks, social distancing, outbreak plan, transportation, cohorts, remote learning, etc. in hopes of best understanding our community’s level of risk. (Here’s a Reopening Schools video to see what it will look like in our Board.)
One of the things I’ve learned through this pandemic is that any time one leaves the house, we must perform a risk assessment to determine if where we are going, what we are doing and who we are seeing exposes us to covid-19. These decisions are guided by Public Health, as they respond to the local data and risk factors. In the beginning, we all had to stay home, compounding anxiety and exacerbating many pre-existing societal inequalities. With the pending reopening, we also have experts weight in and providing guidance about a safe return to school. But that still leaves parents in a difficult spot. <— (This probably the best article that I have read on the conflict.)
It also begs the question: why doesn’t our plan look like that?
The short answer is that we do not have enough money, time or space to properly accommodate those recommendations and so, as a result, other layers of protection are added to mitigate risk (or such is my understanding). Many educators, parents, trustees have been highlighting items that they feel are concerning, based on other global examples, over the last several weeks. It has resulted in an “investment” to support unfunded covid expenses. All Board plans must be approved by our Chief Medical Officer of Health in the province, as well as our local Medical Officer of Health, as has ours. I’ll take a moment to reiterate that I trust our experts, and I will always fall back on making policy decisions based on their recommendations, especially in a global pandemic. I am not a doctor, epidemiologist, nor even a scientist; so I feel strongly that relying on data-driven, localized evidence, which is what our health unit is tasked with doing, is of the utmost importance.
As I’ve had the chance to have many discussions with the GECDSB Administration, I am confident that our Board is working tirelessly to do all that they can to produce a high quality and safe educational experience; however, I don’t know that all parents feel the same way. And so I ask: Do we trust the system we’ve built to keep our kids safe, engage them (online or in-school), and educate them within in the current predicament of a global pandemic? It is hard to trust anything right now, as much of our lives have been upended. While Trustees have tried to build this trust with the public by putting forward motions to support vulnerable students and innovate our communication, we have not been able to see the material changes to fully realize these goals due to the crunched timeline and constant announcements that change the game.
As many parents are strongly considering the option to keep their kids home, many are also choosing to officially homeschool their kids in order to embrace a more flexible learning model, rather than have them bound to a regular school day. With the option for a school board supported remote learning model available, there are many unknowns about how successful a virtual school can be, or if they want their kid in front of a screen for that long. There are so many unknowns, which leaves many parents feeling anxious and uncertain.
My fear with all of this very real and present virus is that it will wreak havoc on our public education system in Ontario for decades to come. In the pursuit of the “best” plan (I am not particularly convinced that there is one, so perhaps safest is the more appropriate description) the waffling from the province, the subsequent lack of clarity from Boards, the fear that families are feeling creates an impossible situation that will lead to disinvestment both mentally and financially from our education system.
Here is another way to look at this current moment: It is not all doom and gloom. We have the opportunity to create a resilient public education system like never before. This is not to take away from the very real health and safety concerns, nor the fundamental changes in our learning environment. Now is the time to innovate to implement new ideas from leading experts that truly honour beautiful and expansive role that education should play in all of our lives. For example, the GECDSB gathered data from our online summer school and is now implementing a virtual school for our students who are opting into the remote-learning stream. This is new, innovative and responding to our current moment in time. It challenges our conventional understanding of school and relationships, which is both beautiful and terrifying. How we connect with the world around us as a child is fundamentally education, and the intersection of a global pandemic and 21st century communications technology has made us rethink how we do so for students of all ages.
Teachers, educators, support staff - I urge you to not lose heart. You are on the front lines of the system and the forefront of this advocacy. I know how much you all care through your time, energy, and mental investment in our classrooms and how much you want to be back in them, but want to do so safely. Some of you will not be able to, and that’s okay too. While things may look different this year, my challenge is for you to keep that same mentality despite all the obstacles and difficulty. That optimism and determination is what translates into creative solutions that will build resiliency and relationships.
Parents - As with all of our decisions we make on a day-to-day basis, we must exercise our best judgement for our families. While many in the community are pushing for the best return to school possible, I urge you to keep asking all the questions and seek to be as informed as possible. Assess the level of risk for your family and make the call that is best that keeps your little (and big ones!) safe. Know that it will be the right one. But understand that others may choose differently, which is okay too.
Leaders - Let’s keep pushing. This goes for politicians and administrators alike. We need to pull all the levers we can based on our public health’s recommendations, evidence-based liabilities, and our regional dynamics. We need to push for the best and safest outcomes. Let’s make sure we keep dialoguing with our communities and listening to their concerns. Someone recently said to me: “Covid has really shown us who are the problem solvers that didn’t just pack up and go home, but who stayed, innovated and kept going despite the obstacles.” It is hard, and none of us asked to be put in this situation, but here we are.
This is a herculean effort and we all need to do our part. And to do so while being kind, compassionate, and empathetic to our fellow citizens. Oh yeah, and make sure you wear a mask.
As this page is not typically dedicated to education issues, I welcome you to continue the conversation by email: sarah.cipkar@publicboard.ca.
