blogcutter | Entries tagged with schools

I certainly don't envy the public health professionals. Many of them have been subject to death threats, online and in-person bullying and harassment and a long list of unpleasant behaviour that may or may not be illegal - simply for doing their job.

While most have no doubt been hired first and foremost for their medical credentials, this is one job where those oft-dubbed "soft skills" are of paramount importance. They have to be ambassadors and mediators and counsellors as well as "just" doctors. It doesn't help when the various stakeholders - politicians, bureaucrats, business people, parents and educators all have different levels of understanding and different, at times competing personal priorities. Common ground must be sought, tempers calmed, fears allayed.

As someone who worked in the bureaucracy for many years, I'd be the first to admit that bureaucrats are often the worst offenders when it comes to erecting needless hoops for others to jump through or spinning endless loops and tangles of red tape. Rules often have good solid reasons and rationales behind them but that doesn't mean they can't be reviewed, revised and simplified!

One of the people who never fails to impress me is Dr. Vera Etches, Ottawa's Chief Medical Officer of Health. Not only does she provide timely, well-informed advice but she keeps her cool and her understanding, empathy and compassion shine through.

With everyone worried about Covid-19, it's easy to understand wanting to exclude potentially infected people from your orbit. But given the nature of the virus, a totally risk-free environment is frankly unachievable - it's a question of managing relative risks and being COVID-WISE.

The quest for an iron-clad guarantee, which some lay people assume could be provided with that piece of paper or e-paper indicating you tested negative for the virus, has led to serious line-ups and bottlenecks in the testing process. In the education system, kids who have only just returned to school after months of absence, are suddenly expected to stay out of school for days or weeks if they show up with a slight sniffle. Then the entire family's life is disrupted for weeks on end for no good reason.

So to clarify matters and reassure anxious people in the school community, Dr. Etches has come out with that tool of the bureaucratic trade, a form letter:

https://www.ottawapublichealth.ca/en/resources/Student-Return-to-School-Attestation.pdf

But unlike the inanities of touch-tone telephone trees or captchas that are supposed to "prove" you're not a robot or some of the other cyber-world innovations, I think most people would agree that this one was crafted with human skill and wisdom!

Current Mood: pleased
Current Location: home

For some folks those unscripted moments during a Zoom call are the highlights of the meeting, if not of the entire day or week. You know the sort of thing I mean: the cat starts knocking everything off a nearby shelf in an effort to get your attention RIGHT NOW; the too-helpful toddler tries to move the cat out of the way for you - by dragging it by the tail like a pull-toy or picking it up in a clumsy choke-hold.

As I may have mentioned before, I quite like getting a peek at the bookshelves in people's home offices or seeing live-action views of their kids, if not au naturel then certainly more believable than some of the stiffly posed photos you may have seen on their desks at work.

But if you're trying to maintain a certain degree of authority, gravitas and professional presence, then perhaps you don't really want real life to happen while you're busy making other plans.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, whole new classes of image consultants have sprung up. Here are a few excerpts from an e-mail that Etsy sent me a few days ago:

Special finds for your virtual video call

Virtual video-call backdrops have their advantages: setting the mood for monthly themed happy hours, instantly camouflaging that clutter corner you didn’t get to. But don’t overlook the possibility of improving your on-screen scene with items you can also enjoy when offline.

Change your backdrop

Add some style

Mugs

Wall decor

Or if you happen to be an elementary school teacher, this might make a great poster for your virtual classroom:

https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/857263819/emotions-and-feelings-faces-masks-kids?ref=reviews

Pandemic-era telecommuting is giving way to a whole new organizational culture!

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: home office
Current Music: Echo Beach

My partner today expressed the opinion that Ontario is re-opening too quickly. I'm not so sure. Remember back in the days of mass government cutbacks, the folks in power would say things like:

We don't necessarily have to work harder; we have to work smarter

OR

We've got to learn to do more with less. We'll have to put a little water in our wine!

Until the put-upon workers managed, at least in a limited way, to point out that when all the fat has been trimmed, you can still cut some of the meat but then you'll have to limit yourself to just a few priorities and do less with less.

With the pandemic, some have asked "Why are we re-opening bars and casinos before we've properly re-opened schools?" Are they making a valid point or is it just another divide-and-conquer tactic? Or is it both or neither?

In Denmark, they've managed to re-open schools without masks or physical distancing, although they definitely have some strict safety protocols:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/denmark-schools-covid-19-pandemic-1.5720508?cmp=rss

Denmark is not Canada, of course (Hans Island notwithstanding) but there are some similarities. Both have winter, for example, which is one potential obstacle in the way of year-round outdoor schooling.

Denmark is well-respected for its progressive social programs. Canada is... well, working on it. Federalism poses multiple challenges for all the various Canadian jurisdictions. I suspect that's not nearly as true for Danish society, although indigenous issues figure into both countries' institutional frameworks.

Fall and winter are likely to bring a second wave and then we may have to adjust our priorities yet again. On the other hand, we're learning more about the virus all the time and I would hope that that would help. And I do see some hopeful signs. For instance, the Liberals have decided that their first policy priority at their November caucus meeting will be the matter of a Universal Basic Income:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/guaranteed-basic-income-priorities-liberals-1.5721943?cmp=rss

If it ends up being the only lesson learned from the pandemic, it could still have a huge impact!

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: home

Back to school. Back to other activities. Halloween. All those things will be happening in the next couple of months and they will happen very differently from how they occurred last year and in years before that.

First, back to school. In Ontario, a majority of parents are opting for in-person schooling for their kids, although a significant minority (in the 25 to 30% range last I heard) have chosen online-only. Supply teachers have some major and very valid concerns about safety, since they tend to go to many different classrooms over the course of the school year. Parents are concerned that the Ontario government has not provided funding for smaller classes, which obviously means more teachers (or at least responsible adults who can oversee them). Wouldn't the obvious solution be to cut class sizes in half (or at least significantly reduce them) and assign the supply teachers to a particular class for the entire year? Classroom space might still be an issue, but the boards of education have portable classrooms they could press into service and the mayor has offered unused space in city buildings as well. Outdoor classes may be an option for part of the year, but obviously there will be days when inclement weather precludes that solution.

Apparently the Girl Guides are back in business too. They plan to hold outdoor meetings this year although it seems door-to-door cookie sales may not be possible. Guides and Scouts have always been, to a great extent, about outdoor activities like camping - in all kinds of weather - so maybe that will work.

And speaking of door-to-door... there's Halloween to consider as well. Will there be any trick-or-treating this year? Masks are very much a part of Halloween but bobbing for apples had become a bit of a no-no even before COVID-19. Halloween parties? Maybe not, although Vera Etches is on record as saying that things like costume parades might be possible. Unwrapped candy or treats? Another no-go area.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: virtual classroom
Current Music: Monster Mash

Does the order in which we re-open things reflect the priorities we as a society place upon them? Or only the priorities of a few chief decision-makers? And who ARE those decision makers? Politicians? Health experts? Businesspeople? Behind-the-scenes advisors? Professional lobbyists? The people who inspire the most collective guilt in us because of past injustices?

Of course, there are a few on both sides of the spectrum who completely reject the whole concept of a phased re-opening. It's either: (a) We can't even BEGIN to think about venturing out into the wider world until there's a reliable vaccine that's accessible to all; or (b) Let's just get back out there and let the chips fall where they may - life is the survival of the fittest! But most of us fall somewhere in between the two extremes - we just can't quite seem to agree on the right balance of risks and rewards.

Take schools, for example. The demand for 5-day-a-week in-person instruction beginning in September. And now that bar re-openings have begun, there's a "schools before bars" movement afoot, mostly from parents of school-aged kids. Some prominent public health people are also questioning the re-opening of bars at this stage too. But now there's also a growing chorus of concern from families where one or more members has a compromised immune system. They worry that they'll be pressured to send the kids back to school too soon, putting their lives and health in jeopardy. Strangely enough, I've heard nothing about, say, a "libraries before bars" initiative, although surely libraries are also important components of the educational process, and arguably THE central component when it comes to life-long learning!

I suppose a lot of the discord arises from the U.S. situation, where many states have been hard-hit by the virus and have been obliged to backtrack on their re-openings or double down on closing things in the first place. And certainly Canadian border towns like Windsor have been particularly vulnerable to U.S. mismanagement of the problem.

For those who are hunkering down for the long haul, prepared to put everything on hold until they can get vaccinated, I'm actually thinking we may get one sooner rather than later:

https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/coronavirusvaccinetracker/

No guarantees, of course. But if we could get a vaccine into doctors' offices and pharmacies before the flu season of 2020-21 gets going in earnest? That might be doable, I think.

Current Mood: hot
Current Location: home
Current Music: Summertime

Somebody once said "My education was interrupted by my schooling." Or words to that effect. It may have been Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw or Winston Churchill. Maybe it was none of the above. In any case, a better truism for this day and age might be "My schooling was interrupted by my education." An education in real life under a pandemic. A school-aged child might also say "This is the way my world ended. Not with a whimper but a BANG!"

Even families who had embraced home schooling to some extent in pre-pandemic days are feeling the strain. At CHEO, Alex Munter has joined the chorus of public health officials in proclaiming that keeping schools closed during a pandemic is much more injurious to our kids' health than re-opening them full-time with a few sensible safety precautions in place. I'm inclined to agree and so, it seems, are plenty of harried Ontario parents, especially if their kids have special needs.

Way back in the 1960s, schools were bursting at the seams. Every classroom typically had 40 students, often more. The schoolyard often had a little village of portable classrooms. When new schools could not be built quickly enough - think Canterbury, for example - plans were occasionally crafted to have two shifts a day (say, 7AM to noon and 1PM to 6PM) of students in one school until the new one was ready. Then after the baby-boomers graduated, schools closed en masse.

The issues facing educators today are a bit different from those of 60 years ago, but one thing remains the same: we don't have enough school-space for the number of kids enrolled. Back then, it was a matter of sheer numbers; now it's a problem of lack of the space required for physical distancing.

Could we not re-open a few schools that were closed for under-enrolment? Repurpose buildings that are currently unused or under-used? And even bring back portable classrooms and build new ones? It seems to me that if an outbreak were to occur in a portable classroom, it would be much easier to keep it contained. And cleaning could occur during school hours too - just move the remaining students to a different classroom.

Does anyone remember the days when every school had a nurse on site? Why not have the nurse located in a portable? Why not put testing sites in portables too?

Fewer kids in a classroom would presumably mean more teachers would be required, or perhaps other adults to supervise independent work or study. I don't think that's an insurmountable problem, though. After all, plenty of working parents have been struggling these past few months to telecommute, teach and look after their kids and look after all the household chores with no access to any kind of outside help.

We've been footing the bill for public education even during the lockdown and while I know most teachers are doing their best and have had their own lives and families and problems to deal with, is it really too much to ask that we get our kids back in real-life school in September?

Current Mood: determined
Current Location: home
Current Music: Maggie Mae