(rdnewsNOW file photo)

By Troy Gillard and Sheldon Spackman

Preparations Underway

Red Deer school districts hoping for the best, planning for everything this fall

Jun 12, 2020 | 1:43 PM

Red Deer’s two largest school districts are, like others across the province, busy working to be ready for whatever the start of the 2020-21 school year is going to look like.

Education Minister Adriana LaGrange said Wednesday that the province expects to have students back in classrooms in September with a final decision to be made by Aug. 1.

Stu Henry, Superintendent for Red Deer Public Schools, says they’re pleased to hear it’s extremely likely they will return to school under Scenario 1 – normal operations, with some restrictions.

“We’ll still have to make some changes, like really ramping up our cleaning and still trying to do as much distancing as we can but basically back to normal, so that was great news,” he explains. “The way we enter and exit the school will be a little different, the way the kids get on and off the buses, limiting the amount of visitors at a school. There’s certainly going to be some changes but for us, the big thing would be is if we can get all the kids back to school every day, that’s just such a win.”

Scenario 2 would see in-school classes partially resume with additional health measures in place, while Scenario 3 would mean at home learning continues and in-school classes cancelled.

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“When we get into Scenario 2, then we get into some strict rules about two metre distancing and no more than 15 kids in a class at a time and so that’s when it gets very, very disruptive to learning,” Henry says. “If we have to have two metres of distance between kids, it makes bussing really problematic. We can only put about a dozen students on a bus, you’ll probably have less than 15 kids in a classroom and so there’s just no way to have all the kids in the school at the same time and all the normal bus loads to be the same.”

Henry says Red Deer Public will be adding staff to ensure their facilities meet increased cleaning requirements during the daytime.

“The good news is schools will never be cleaner and we’re going to keep them safe for the kids. The bad news is we don’t have any extra dollars to hire all those extra staff members, so finances are going to get pretty problematic in the future I think.”

A recent survey of Red Deer Public Schools families shows 92 per cent of respondents want their children back at school under normal operations this fall.

At Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools, Interim Superintendent Kathleen Finnigan says their relaunch team is meeting on a continual basis to determine what learning will look like under all three scenarios.

“What does social distancing look like, what does hygiene look like while the learning still occurs?” asks Finnigan. “What do we do if we have a group of students that can’t get back into the school? How do we continue to support their learning at home and what do we do to continue learning for those children that come every day, or what does extra-curricular look like?”

Finnigan says they also have another team looking into how to support students considered to be the most fragile.

“Like those that have cognitive and social or emotional concerns, so it’s all around the mental health and the complex needs of students,” adds Finnigan. “Then we have another team looking at human resources – like what about our staff who are medically compromised? How do we support them? Who’s at-risk? How do we do a refusal of work process?”

If Scenario 2 or 3 were to be implemented due to the circumstances of COVID-19, Finnigan says another team would likely need to be established for larger amounts of online learning.

“Do I create a team of teachers that can teach online to the students that cannot come into school? That would be my biggest challenge right now,” admits Finnigan. “Another would be transportation, how do we get them to school? Also, how do we keep our facilities clean and safe from an emotional or physical point of view?”

“Everybody wants to be back,” says Finnigan. “That connection is key. Learning at home is fine and our teachers and our parents have been doing an amazing job at keeping the learning going, but people want to see each other, they’re missing one another.”

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