Deadlines loom to choose online or in-person schooling

Edmonton families are up against the clock to choose between attending school in person or learning online.

Deadlines set by several Edmonton-area school divisions for families to register their decisions either passed this week or loom in the coming days.

Edmonton public school board vice-chair Shelagh Dunn said she knows that with job demands, child care and other factors, some families have more flexibility than others.

"I want to recognize what a hard position this places many families in," she said on Friday. "There's no real right or wrong answer, which makes it kind of difficult right now."

As the COVID-19 pandemic forces schools to re-evaluate every detail of doing business as usual, school divisions say students can register to attend in person or study online this year.

Edmonton public and Catholic schools will allow students to toggle between those options at four points during the year as schools shift to a quarterly system.

As COVID-19 cases rise in the Edmonton zone, parents and guardians are left with the dilemma of supervising their schooling at home or sending them back into buildings where they could be at risk of catching coronavirus.

Diana Keto-Lambert and her husband Brett Lambert are wrestling with that choice for their older son, six-year-old Cooper. He's starting Grade 1 this September at Richard Secord School in south Edmonton.

Both parents are working from home, and Keto-Lambert's work hours have been reduced. It's pushing them to lean on keeping Cooper home.

Crowding all children into the school at once with the same class sizes as there were before the pandemic makes both parents nervous.

"It feels like it could be a nightmare waiting to happen," Lambert said.

Keto-Lambert wanted to see a better plan and more funding from the government to spread children out into smaller groupings. Slapping on hand sanitizer regularly isn't going to help, she said.

In absence of extra funding for schools, she wanted to see schools return with the government's "scenario 2" — where children would attend school in person on alternate days to cut class sizes in half.

"If I sent him back, I would feel terrible," she said. "And if I keep him home, I worry about his socialization. It just seems like a no-win situation."

The cost of cleanliness

Earlier this week, board chair Trisha Estabrooks said the Edmonton public school board had written to Education Minister Adriana LaGrange asking for an additional $30 million to meet urgent staffing and supply needs during the pandemic.

The board would use that, plus about $20 million from its reserves, to hire additional teachers, custodians and support staff for students with disabilities, she said.

Individual school-level plans, which began trickling out this week from schools across the province, refer to sanitizing classrooms between each cohort of students and bathrooms needing a scrub down several times a day. When a case of COVID-19 shows up in a school — and it will, Estabrooks says — custodians will need to deep clean some areas before students and staff are allowed back in.

As of Friday, the board was awaiting the minister's response.

No band rooms or lockers, high school 'campuses'

School-level plans for some city public schools began appearing online Friday.

McNally High School will divide its students up into four "campuses" to keep students' movement limited to one section of the building. Classes will move in and out of the building or between rooms at five-minute intervals to keep teens out of hallways.

Students will be divvied up into "Track A" and "Track B" based on the first letter of their last name. If schools suddenly pivot to a scenario when students are told to attend on alternating days, those tracks determine which days they should come in person.

Hand sanitizer will be in every room, the cafeteria will be closed and vending machines will be shut off. Lockers are off limits. Several rooms will be shuttered.

At Richard Secord elementary school, there will be limits on the number of children allowed in bathrooms at the same time. Recess times will be staggered and children will wear coloured belt pinnies so teachers can keep them sorted into cohorts.

Edmonton Catholic Schools spokesperson Lori Nagy said school-level plans are still in the works at that division and will be emailed to parents in advance of the Sept. 2 school reopening.

Families with children in Edmonton Catholic schools were asked to submit their choices of online versus in-person learning by Friday. In preliminary numbers gathered earlier this week, Nagy said about 20 per cent of students were choosing the online option.

Dunn said the public division has no estimates about how parents and guardians will lean. Edmonton public students are being asked to submit decisions online by Aug. 21. School staff will have to call every family that doesn't make a selection, she said.

Parkland School Division, which includes Spruce Grove and Stony Plain, had asked parents to indicate their choices by last Wednesday. The survey is still open and the division is still collecting responses, spokesperson Jordi Weidman said on Friday.

Sherwood Park-based Elk Island Public Schools has a Monday deadline for families to send their responses.