British Columbia is pushing back the start of the school year from Sept. 8 to a later date as plans are tweaked to follow the latest COVID-19 guidelines.
Provincial Education Minister Rob Fleming said Tuesday that students will be welcomed back to classrooms later in the second week of September after staff review new rules from the BC Centre for Disease Control and school operation policies. He did not provide an exact date for the resumption of full-time classes.
“Having the restart week staged in some kind of manner that would have staff teams together for a couple days before we gradually welcome kids back to make sure that every school – all 1,500 of them in the province – are truly ready to welcome students is a good idea, and that’s the approach that we’ll be taking,’' he said.
“You will hear an announcement in the coming days clearly about what Sept. 8 will look like for staff teams, including support staff, principals and vice-principals and the teaching staff coming back into the school.”
Mr. Fleming said the government and its steering committee are working to finalize how school operations will work. In the past, students going back to class would return to their previous classrooms before moving to new ones, but Mr. Fleming said that isn’t safe now.
“That obviously can’t happen under these pandemic conditions.‘‘
Since the government unveiled its original reopening plan at the end of last month, parents and teachers have expressed anxieties over the cohorts, dubbed learning groups. Principals in many school districts were called back to work last week to discuss how they could implement the groups at their schools, and a petition calling for the return to school to be optional, citing “unsafe” conditions, surpassed 23,000 signatures.
Last week, Premier John Horgan hinted his government may delay the opening of elementary and high schools to make these adjustments.
The BC Teachers’ Federation, the union representing teachers across the province, had said it expected the start date of the first day of school to remain flexible as circumstances change. A union spokesperson was unavailable to comment on the delay Tuesday.
The opposition BC Liberals say there are still many concerns about a restart that has created widespread uncertainty and confusion for families. Of particular concern, education critic Dan Davies said in an e-mailed statement, is the lack of guidelines for parents whose immune systems – or those of their children – are compromised. Teachers are also concerned about the long-term effects on their health if they get infected by a student who is asymptomatic, he added.
Masks to remain optional for B.C. students, despite public health guidelines
The provincial plan so far includes extra cleaning and hand-hygiene stations, supplying masks and having children separated into learning groups of no more than 60 students in middle school and 120 in secondary schools. The B.C. government said the learning group numbers were determined with advice from Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry and are based, in part, on the ability to contact trace should someone within the cohort test positive for COVID-19.
At a briefing Monday, Dr. Henry was asked about the large increase in U.S. children being infected by the novel coronavirus and what that means for the coming resumption of school. She said the rise in childhood cases there is concerning but not surprising, and that transmission of the virus will occur in schools but mostly where the virus has already infected many in the community.
Dr. Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix issued a statement Tuesday declaring 46 new cases across the province, for a total of 472 active infections. So far, 195 people have died in B.C. from the virus.
With a report from the Canadian Press
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