Public schools throughout Saskatchewan have been closed since March 20 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Students who wanted to continue with their school year have been able to through remote learning options with either online learning or through delivered packages.
Over two months into the school closures and with the pandemic still having a major impact through Canada and a need for physical distancing, it’s still unknown when schools could return.
There’s just over three months until the 2020-21 school year would regularly begin and school divisions are preparing for every option.
Good Spirit School Division
The Good Spirit School Division has remained busy throughout the pandemic, says Director of Education Quintin Robertson.
“Our over 800 employees continue to access benefits and pay,” said Robertson.
“Schools are continuing to operate, as far as the physical building. We’ve been working extremely hard to update our facilities, so projects that were going to be on the back burner until summer or next year are getting done now. We’ve got maintenance and caretaking personnel working diligently to do those projects. We’ve brought in all of our busses to perform regular maintenance that would have been spread over a long period of time. It’s been lots of work behind the scenes, we’ve maximized our extra time.”
“Our teaching staff and paraprofessional staff are connecting with kids to continue to implement our supplemental learning plan. I have four kids at home and every day they’re online on Zoom, connecting with their teachers, working on assignments, and submitting work. My daughter — who is in grade 12 — just completed her research essay as she would have in her class whether she was there or not. She just submitted it to her teacher, received feedback, and resubmitted that.”
“We’re also working really hard on grad,” he said. “We’re trying to acknowledge our graduates through virtual means this spring and face-to-face at a later date. We just met a third time with our graduation committee to discuss grad and to respond to the info that came out on May 22 about drive-in grad.”
Although the remote learning methods haven’t been ideal, Robertson says the school division has ensured everybody who wants access has been able to get it.
“It’s been not without its complications,” he said. “We’ve given out almost 1,000 devices to our students and staff. Those were deployed by our bus drivers to remote locations around the school division. We’ve also supplied a couple hundred wifi hotspots that provide wifi access to those families that didn’t have it — it’s a cellphone that is locked down and can only be used for a controlled amount of wifi. I think it’s worked relatively well.”
“We are planning to gather participation rates as we prepare for the fall. That’s something that we’re going to be enacting soon. We had about 90 per cent of our students say they were going to participate in supplemental learning and now we want to know how many actually did.”
“We meet every two weeks with the administrators to discuss the supplemental plan, we meet every two weeks with the board, we’ve met 18 times since the pandemic started with our education council to adjust,” he said. “It’s constantly ebbing and flowing based on what we know.”
Currently, Robertson says the school division is prepping for a return in September by getting schools and staff ready.
“We’ve been told by the Education Response Planning Team — a group of the education community — to plan for two scenarios,” he said. “One would be a return of kids in the fall as per our calendar, but with restrictions and then also to plan for remote learning. In preparation for that we are calculating the carrying capacity of everyone of our schools and every room in our schools to determine how many people can be in those rooms with two metres of distance. We have half of our schools and our central office done. We’ll have all of that done by next week.”
“The primary focus will be on making sure our buildings are safe, that students and staff feel safe in the buildings, and acknowledging the trauma some may have felt through this. We’re using a document that was developed by Kevin Cameron and it’s a traumatic events response and it guides school divisions through this kind of tricky territory. We will take the month of June to really test this out.”
“In preparation for the fall we’ve also introduced a reintroduction plan for our staff to start coming back into the buildings,” he said.
“Today (May 28) our administrators and administrative assistants are allowed back into the buildings, next week our practical and applied arts teachers, science teachers, and physical education teachers will be back, and then on June 18 it is open to any staff that feel they need to be in the building to prepare for the fall. The optional return for staff in the spring is to really test out how prepared we are as far as hand washing stations, sanitization, and disinfecting. We want to make sure that we’ve got it right for when our kids come back.”
South East Cornerstone Division
“We’re preparing for a September return,” said South East Cornerstone Division Director of Education Lynn Little. “We’ve been directed to prepare for a number of different scenarios. We’re expecting a framework for those scenarios to be provided to us within the next few weeks.”
“The Education Response Planning Team — a provincial body — is working on a framework for a return and to my understanding it will include three different scenarios. Once we have those scenarios, each school division will prepare for how we will align with and deliver education in those three scenarios.”
“One scenario would be with students back in the classroom, but honouring of course physical distancing, intensive cleaning, and all of those different pieces,” she said. “Another scenario would be remote delivery and it would be similar to what we’re doing now, but not supplemental. It would be a delivery of the curriculum and expectations would be that the students have to participate in it from an educational perspective. Then the third one is a mixture of the two, a partial return to keep the numbers smaller. There will be challenges around each of those and once we get the frameworks we will take a look and do our work within those frameworks and that will be our intensive work in June.”
“We haven’t been given a date on when we would be potentially notified on which options it would be, but as soon as we would know that then we would absolutely communicate with our families.”
“We’ve already made some adjustments in our facilities where we do have some staff working and cleaning,” she said. “Doing things like cleaning those high touch areas more frequently and having hand sanitization stations available. We will have all those pieces in play, we’re just waiting for some direction and support from the government level.”
Since schools were closed because of the pandemic, Little says the remote learning has been working well.
“We’re busy,” said Little. “Supplemental learning continues in our schools and will continue through until the end of June. We’ve received feedback from some folks that remote learning is going very well and students are able to directly engage with their teachers in class or in one-on-one. They’re able to receive speech and language support directly online and we’ve heard that it’s been very positive because the parents are a part of that often. So that transition between the home and the school is a little tighter which is a silver lining for sure.
“Communication is positive, but of course there are some challenges,” she said. “As the weather improves we are seeing less engagement as time goes on, just even in the last week there’s been a little bit of a drop-off in some parts of the system. It kind of depending on rural, farming, etc.”
It’s been a learn as you go experience for everybody involved with the remote learning options, but ultimately it has worked because of the commitment staff, students, and families have put into it.
“There haven’t been any major adjustments (to remote learning), but definitely as the staff, students, and families have become more accustom to the platform — Microsoft Teams — we’re being able to extend the capabilities of that,” she said. “That’s been really working on engagement and engagement through technology as opposed to just a point of delivery by having engagement with a back and forth. We’ve been working on that and the teachers have really been trying to incorporate that more so it’s been very positive.”
“In terms of the learning packages, and accessing those learning packages, because that piece doesn’t exist for the folks that don’t have the remote learning opportunity, we’ve been trying to use telephones and traditional communication methods to still reach out personally with the students. That’s proving to be positive as well.”
“There will be more project-based and outcome-based assessments,” she said. “In terms of having a traditional final written assessment, that wouldn’t typically be the norm for online. It’s more based on individual students, is there a particular outcome that they can show they’re learning? Teachers are doing it in different ways, but it will be more project and assignment based than it would be a formal assessment with paper and pencil.”
Little says the school division has remained busy as well with preparation for the end of the school year and planning for the next academic year.
“As a system we’re busy too,” she said. “We’re winding down the year for sure and kind of looking for the typical year end procedures we’d be working on. We’re staffing for next year and we’re busy putting in contracts and getting ready for that piece of it. We’re preparing students for transitions into their new grade levels — sometimes it’s grade-to-grade and sometimes it’s school-to-school like Wapella (students) moving over to McNaughton and McLeod (students) moving up into McNaughton.”
“Some of our schools are working on developing virtual tours for the children because they can’t go into the schools to walk through, but giving virtual tours and talking about the programs is something our staffs are working on. We’re doing some professional development for next year and getting ready for that. We’re just trying to make sure that all of the processes we would typically do are done and they’re just done in a different way that follows the guidelines of the chief medical officer.”
The school division, staff, students, and families have been thrown into a situation nobody expected, but Little says they’ve made the best of it.
“Overall, for sure it’s challenging to change to remote learning partway through the year and I’m very grateful to the families that have been working with us and patient with us as we learn and grow with this,” she said. “But we continue to look at this and the teachers have been a resilient lot and are looking for the positives and silver linings in this. We’re seeing some of those silver linings, we have our lessons on Microsoft Teams and in the future when we hopefully get back to a face-to-face if a student is absent then we have the ability to give them the lesson. There’s lot of pieces like that where we think good will come out of this instructionally in the end.”
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