Emerging Realities of the COVID-19 Classroom

How the new school years was going to look has been anybody’s guess for some time. Now we’re a week out from welcoming students back into schools, and the picture that is emerging is not a pretty one.

They crunched the final numbers yesterday and the axes started to fall. My school had fifty teachers, and it is now down to thirty-nine. We lost eleven classes worth of kids (just over 20%) and so we lost eleven teachers. Those teachers were declared “excess to school”. Most will be re-assigned to online teaching, as numbers require; the rest will be ‘furloughed’ until there are enough students to warrant calling them back.

The re-assigned teachers were not selected for online teaching because they expressed a preference or showed an aptitude. They were selected because they were the lowest on the seniority list. There was no mechanism for any other teacher to step in and say, “Actually, I’d prefer to teach online, can I go instead?” These teachers didn’t choose this.

I know these teachers, personally and professionally. They’ll work themselves into the ground in order to do an extraordinary job for the kids assigned to them. It’s just so unnecessary for them to have to.

Full-sized classes next to empty classrooms

For the teachers and students who will be doing school in person, there is now a lot of extra space in the school. To be precise, eleven classrooms have now been freed up.

This does not mean more space for smaller classes, though you’d be forgiven for thinking it might.

Those eleven classrooms will be empty when school starts, and the classes that remain will each have about twenty-five students in them.

I’ll say that again: twenty-five students and a teacher all together in one classroom, with eleven classrooms standing empty in the school, while excessed teachers wait to be called back from their lay-off.

One meter’s distance is “safe enough”

We have already compromised on the “two meters apart” rule that has been so universal since this pandemic began. That happened early on; no one even attempted to make that possible in the back-to-school plan. Apparently schools are the exception to that rule, maybe because students are known for being very attentive to hygiene.

That in itself is confusing. Is the two meter rule so excessively cautious that we can easily halve it with no consequences to safety, or was it supported by science? If two meters is what is supported by science, why is one meter okay? Suddenly, because the funding model requires it, someone waves a hand and one meter is fine? It’s a clear contradiction. Two meters is a safe distance for everyone except large concentrations of children. Groups of more than fifteen people were not sanctioned until very late phases of re-opening, but twenty-five is fine for schools while we wait for a second wave.

Even with the lower standard, though, there is no way I can distribute twenty-five desks in my room so that the students will a) remain one meter apart AND b) be able to see the board or the projector screen. I just about managed it with the nineteen desks that were in my classroom when I arrived last week. Not sure how I’m going to add six more.

So even the reduced safety standard is not achievable with the numbers as they are. Students will not be able to maintain any kind of distance in class.

A classroom at my school containing twenty-two desks. No chairs yet.

Health and Safety Protocols

The good news is that we received robust health and safety training. We have been walked through all of the enhanced safety protocols, such as walking single file in the hall, and limiting how many students can be in the bathroom at one time, rotating recess so only one grade is outside at a time, and requiring students to stay with their own class in their own zone of the schoolyard. We know what PPE is required and how to wear it. We even received WHMIS training in hazardous substances because we’ll be doling out the hand sanitizer. We will drill the students in these procedures, and insist that they be followed at all times.

Anyone who tried to homeschool in the spring can attest that students don’t always do what you want them to do. Even if we enforce procedures religiously, there will be twenty-five kids in each classroom. Twenty-five energetic, smelly, sociable, mischievous, fidgety, germy kids. In a space the size of a Hasty Market, where the capacity is limited to ten people at a time.

The ‘enhanced’ safety measures can only do so much.

Teachers’ concerns dismissed from the start

The safety measures that teachers – and their unions – are asking for are only the measures that are already in place everywhere else. No special treatment required; we’re only asking that teachers and students be protected to the same standards as customers in, say, an LCBO.

Nevertheless, the messaging from the Minister of Education and Premier Ford has been consistently dismissive and disdainful. Teachers are complaining because they don’t want to do the hard work. Unions are being willfully obstructionist and causing problems on purpose. The government – so goes the rhetoric – has been successfully working in good faith with groups all across the province, so if the Teachers’ Federations can’t play nice then obviously the problem is not the government. Of course the teachers want more, they always do, but they’re over-reacting. They’re being unrealistic in their demands and don’t have a good grasp of the situation. It’ll be fine, they’ll see. We’re leading the nation in our back-to-school plan. What more do the teachers want?

In a word, gaslighting. I’m a woman in a traditionally female profession. I am more than familiar with the phenomenon. It is demoralizing every time.

First day of school

I cannot wait to meet my students. Being able to see their faces and respond to their curiosity and questions is central to my teaching, so teaching online to blank screens was tough. I am thrilled to be going into the classroom once again, even with all these challenges, and I have big plans.

All my plans depend on the kids feeling safe and supported. That is my first job, and my most important one. I am the one who sets the tone and determines the dynamic in the classroom. Doing so calls for an intense investment of emotional energy and labour, especially in the early days of a school year. At this point in the year, I would usually be setting up my classroom, sharing ideas with colleagues, getting excited, and generally building up my store of energy and positivity to be ready to welcome the kids on the first day.

Instead, I am reeling from the loss of valued colleagues, and witnessing their hurt and their worry. I am grieving that the students’ experience in school next week will fall far short of what I would like to offer them, both in terms of energy and of safety. I am weary from the knowledge that we have everything we would need to make them safer – enough space, and enough qualified teachers – and we’ve just chosen not to.

Who can afford to keep their kids safe when the Ontario government won’t?

This week’s return to school plan reinforces systemic racism. I thought we’d decided to do better.

This week, Stephen Lecce announced the province’s plan for reopening schools in September. Although there are several safety measures in place, one thing that has not changed is class sizes. There will be an average class size of 26 kids, which has gone up from last year due to the new employment contract (remember the teachers’ strike?). This in spite of the fact that most of the schools that have reopened globally have done so with reduced class size (10-15 students). (Source.)

Many of the parents and teachers I have spoken to are worried. They really expected class sizes to decrease for the return to school. I’ve had conversations with parents who were considering taking a leave of absence from work, or continuing to work from home where possible, in order to avoid sending their kids back to school before they know it’s safe. 

It doesn’t feel safe right now. 

Because we all know the benefits to our kids of going to school, rather than learning remotely, many other parents are considering other schooling alternatives. Private schools in Ontario are receiving a much higher volume of inquiry calls from parents who want certainty and safety. (Source.) In particular, kids with exceptional needs or learning disabilities, who did not thrive in the distance learning model, need to be back at school. So parents are looking for a safe way to send them.

Private school tuition can be as low as $7000 a year per child, but most of the ones I found begin at $13, 000 or so, and go up from there. $33, 000 per year was the highest one I saw. I didn’t look for long. (Source.)

All of the options being explored by these parents are available to them because they have flexibility in their work, or in their finances. The alternatives will be inconvenient, certainly, and will have an impact on the family’s finances for a long time to come. But they are a possibility.

A great many parents in Ontario do not have that kind of flexibility. They cannot just stay home, and give up one of the family’s sources of income—possibly their only one. Their jobs require (or their employers demand) their physical presence, so working from home is not an option. Many of them are getting by on their current household income, if they’re fortunate, but they do not have the resources to spend an extra $13, 000 per year to send their child to a private school.

These parents are exactly as concerned as the parents who have alternatives. 

It’s just that there’s nothing they can do about it. The schools are open, so they have to send their kids. The options available to higher-income families simply don’t exist for them.

In the current model, a safe return to school is something you can only have if you can afford it. 

That reality is repugnant enough on its own, if we value what we say we value in terms of equity and human rights. There’s something that makes it worse, though.

Canada has a racialized income gap. That means that the families who can afford to purchase safety for their children are more likely to be white, and the families who can’t are more likely not to be. If we further break down the numbers, we will find Black Canadians among the most disadvantaged among visible minorities. (Source.)

Not clear? Let me lay it out:

White families are more likely to be able to buy safety for their kids than Black families. 

It is exactly that serious. This is what is meant by systemic racism. Policies that are not overtly, or even intentionally, racist, that nevertheless just happen to disadvantage people who aren’t white.

Black lives matter. We’ve been saying it a lot lately, and I hope we keep saying it. But if Black lives matter, they have to matter all the time. Not just in terms of whether police are brutalizing or killing them, but also in terms of their health, well-being, education, and ability to reach their potential. Black education has to matter. Protection from illness for Black children and their families has to matter. 

We’re already falling down on this. To no one’s surprise, once the province started collecting race-based data around Covid-19, we discovered that racialized people, and Black people in particular, are much, much more likely to contract the coronavirus than white people. In Toronto, “Black people account for 21 per cent of reported cases in the city, while making up only nine per cent of the overall population.” (Source.) Here is the full data. Here is Kwame McKenzie, the CEO of the Wellesley Institute and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, explaining the discriminatory nature of this virus. Just like a family’s options around the return to school, it is heavily correlated with income, and therefore with race.

Are we anti-racist or not?

In his statement about anti-Black racism (published here on July 6th), Stephen Lecce said that we need an education system that is “inclusive, accountable and transparent, and one that by design, is set up to fully and equally empower all children to achieve their potential.” Anti-Black racism in Ontario schools, he said, must not be allowed to continue. 

To this end, he decreed that Ontario will stop streaming students as they enter high school, as this practice disadvantages Black kids, and will ban suspensions of students in the primary grades (K-3).

Cost to the province: $0. It’s easy enough to be against racism when it doesn’t change much and doesn’t cost anything.

Sending kids back to school full-time in classes of about 15 kids would cost a lot. $3.2 billion, the Ontario Liberals estimate. That’s just over ten times the $309 million in Lecce’s model. We need to do it anyway.

If we don’t, it’s because we’re okay with the status quo, where higher income families have options for keeping their kids safe, and lower income families don’t. Where Black people are getting sick, and being hospitalized, at a disproportionate rate, and with worse outcomes. If we don’t, it’s because, collectively, we’ve decided that Black lives only matter as long as they don’t cost more than we’re willing to pay.

It’s not too late to change our path. Call, write, post, tweet, whatever. If anything about racism in our society has sunk in for you in the last few months, please don’t be silent.

Find out how to contact your MPP.

Contact Doug Ford.

Contact Stephen Lecce.

Can everyone go back to school , please?

I want to go back to school.

I can’t emphasize that enough. I’m a teacher, and I am so, so anxious to be back in the classroom. I have big plans! There’s so much going on in the world, and I’ve learned so much in the past few months. I can’t wait to share it with my Grade 8s, and find out what they’ve learned. I want to figure out what they need from me to be able to make Canada better. Also, distance learning was awful.

I want my students to be back in school. They’re lonely and bored and isolated, and their lives haven’t stopped just because school is closed. Being an adolescent is tough enough even without a pandemic. Some of them were already coming off the rails back in April; they need to be back at school. Also, distance learning, despite their parents’ and teachers’ best efforts, was awful.

I want my children to go back to school. They need challenges. They need socialization. They need relationships with more than just the people they share a house with. They need teachers who aren’t their mother, and whose only job when they’re at school is to teach. They need a reason to leave the house every day. Distance learning, even with truly excellent, inspired work from their teachers, was awful.

Doesn’t everyone want the schools to reopen? Doesn’t everyone want this?

There’s this pandemic, though. You’ve probably heard about it. We’re fed up with it, but that doesn’t mean we can choose not to deal with it. Teachers’ unions and parents’ associations aren’t just making it up in order to be difficult. As much as we would like to, we can’t just wave a hand and say, ta-da! It’s safe now!

Of course we all want to reopen the schools. And indeed, our provincial leaders seem set to make that happen. They’re being very cagey, though, about what they’re going to do to make that happen safely. There’s a lot of talk but apparently not much by way of resourcing.

Thing is, this virus is not impressed with their rhetoric. Neither am I, frankly. I would love to trust them with this–with my life and livelihood–but I do not believe they have my best interests front-of-mind. I don’t want to be convinced. I want to be safe.

It isn’t about convincing Ontarians that it’s safe. It’s about actually making it safe.

If we want to reopen schools (and I do, I might have mentioned), we can’t do it the way we used to. We have a lot of changes to make.

Class sizes need to drop dramatically, so we’ll need more space. Not really a problem, since there are all these unused community centers, libraries, and other public buildings standing more or less empty. These are public buildings. We already own them. What do we do about transportation? Custodial workers? PPE? Symptom screening? I don’t know! I am a Middle School teacher. I am willing to bet, though, that there are people in this province with the expertise and the organizational knowledge and the bird’s eye view to figure out the buildings, and the transportation, and the PPE. I wonder if we know who they are? I wonder if we’ve asked them?

Seems like there are a lot of people they haven’t asked.

As a parent, I will feel safe sending my children to school if they are in classes of no more than 15 kids. I will feel safe sending my children to school if they will be with the same teacher all day, and the same kids. I will feel safe sending my kids to school if they can all go for the whole day, and then observe proper distancing measures when they go home, instead of having to be farmed out to a vast array of daycare solutions during the time they ought to be in school. I will feel safe if there is screening and symptom-monitoring and a plan for what to do if there’s a positive test. I will feel safe sending my kids to school if there is adequate custodial staff with adequate supplies and funding to keep the learning spaces safe. Not safe-ish. Safe.

As a teacher, those are also all the conditions that I would need in order to feel safe going back to school.

Spoiler: This is going to cost A Lot.

It’s going to cost a lot no matter where you cut, or where you skimp, or where you hope that the parents, grandparents, babysitters and older siblings will step up and shoulder the cost and burden. No matter that much of that burden will be shouldered by women, usually unpaid. It’s still going to cost a lot.

It’s going to cost a lot, and we have to pay what it costs. All of what it costs. Because if we only pay for part of what it costs, we might as well have done nothing. If we have tubs of hand sanitizer in every classroom, but we keep the average class size at 26, we might as well save our money. If we have smaller cohorts, but have them all alternating in the same spaces, they’ll still be at risk. If we have small classes and enough learning spaces, but inadequate custodial staff, there’s no point.

The only way to justify paying for any of it is to pay for all of it.

Every person in Ontario who has regular contact with a school-age child, or who works with someone who does, is affected by this. Add to that people with conditions that place them more at risk who must be vigilant about any kind of community spread, and it becomes pretty much everyone. If we do this right, everyone will be better off.

I really, really want to go back to school. Mr. Ford would like to send me. He needs to do more than just tell me it’s fine, though. He needs to actually make it safe.