If there was a resounding message from the chat with Education Critic Sarah Hoffman, it was that the government should reduce class sizes and increase the funding to schools. The NDP had spent a lot of time and energy coming up with a 15 point Back To School Plan. As efficient as their plan seems, the UCP government has ignored every idea put forward by the opposition party and by any advocacy group in an interesting display of governance and leadership.
It would appear that the government had cherry-picked to implement a face masking requirement in schools. Hoffman has said consistently in a series of videos on Facebook, press briefings that the UCP’s back to school plan is not sufficient for a safe re-entry back to school.
15 suggestions included a province-wide cap of 15 students per classroom and to hire the staff necessary to achieve this. This suggestion is to help enforce physical distancing. Most of the classrooms in Alberta have cohorts of 30 to 40. This makes enforcing a 2m distance between each student is simply impossible. The opposition party is asking the government to begin to look at where they can create the class spaces they need. Their suggestions included asking the government to revise cuts to student support and rehire more than the 20,000 support staff they fired at the start of the pandemic.
The opposition party is not the ones making suggestions to the government. Last week, we have Save Our Students, Alberta who urged for parents and interested people to advocate for public education. On Wednesday, Jason Schilling, the President of the Alberta Teachers Association expressed a lack of confidence in Minister’s Lagrange re-opening plan. He urged the government to delay the start of the school year to give teachers’ enough time to get ready for resumption.
Something seems to be off with the government’s plan, it seems worrisome that very many people are uncomfortable with resumption. The plan cannot be to shelve school altogether or to make homeschooling a permanent fixture even though this is being offered to parents as an alternative.
The suggestions ask the government to develop best practice guideline to limit student travel between classrooms, provide additional funding to offset the cost of additional cleaning and PPE and to develop a policy for school busses.
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