Opinion: In just a few weeks our kids will pile into overcrowded, poorly ventilated classrooms. Our voices aren’t being heard. So maybe it’s time to walk off the job (if we have jobs)
Ontario Premier Doug Ford, left, and Education Minister Stephen Lecce at Father Leo J Austin Catholic Secondary School in Whitby, Ont., on July 30, 2020.
As we approach the fall of 2020, I wonder if it’s time for Ontario’s parents to steal a page from the Redstockings’ handbook. Like them, many of us feel helpless, frustrated at not having our voices heard. We’ve bleated for months about getting our kids to go back to school as safely as possible. Yet the province’s plan for elementary schools at least—still being formulated by school boards, who were still getting direction from the government as of Aug. 13—stops short of this.
Over the past several weeks, conversations I’ve had with parents in my neighbourhood and across my city—anecdotal evidence, entirely—swing between anxiety, anger and nervous resolve. “I know, I know, it’s awful. There’s going to be COVID in schools. But we’ve decided we’re taking the risk. They need to go,” one parent told me last week. “Feels like we’re tossing her into a giant science experiment,” another Toronto mother told me by text. “With pretty high stakes.
Mostly, we just hope it will work out. After all, there are few certainties in a global pandemic. There will never be a way to reopen schools, or anything else, that doesn’t involve some risk. On the other hand, there’s a demonstrated way to lower that risk: have fewer kids in class.
The Ontario government’s response to the school file, however, has echoes of pre-pandemic political fights. Less than four weeks before the scheduled start to school, education minister Stephen Lecce announced a plan allowing school boards to spend their reserve funds to make classrooms safer. He also unveiled some additional funding for improving air quality—creating an absurdly short timeline to plan, fund, and execute the critical work needed in many of Ontario’s 5,000 schools.
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