The Ford government announced Wednesday afternoon that kids will not be going back to the classroom before the end of the current school year, and local reaction finds many feeling frustrated.
“This government has disappointed us from the beginning. He’s disregarded students and kids for the whole pandemic” said Andrea Loken, Kingston’s president for the Ontario Secondary School’s Teacher’s Federation.
Loken says she and many others in the area would rather a local approach when it comes to reopening school.
“There’s seemingly no plan. There seems to be no benchmarks. No one knows what the rules are. He has allowed a regional approach, then not a regional approach. Its all of these things. Last-minute decisions, Friday announcements — very, very frustrating”.
Dr. Tess Clifford from the Queen’s Psychology Clinic says the back-and-forth transitions over the last 14 months have been stressful for parents and students alike.
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She believes being behind a screen for the last few weeks of the school year will be even more detrimental to student’s mental health.
“Having the last few weeks at school was an opportunity for kids to just have some fun together and have the signal that things are getting better in our community and things come move forward, that we can have a fun summer and we can wrap up those relationships” she said.
Kingston and Islands MPP Ian Arthur says he’s disappointed with the Ford government’s inconsistency on the education front. He says more could have been done earlier to avoid lengthy school closures.
“We have had a full school year. We knew what we had to do. We had to hire more teachers, so that classrooms can be distanced,” Arthur said.
“Doug was still trying to force 30 students into a classroom. We knew that was not a safe environment to put students into.”
Going forward, the province needs a more solid plan to ensure this situation does not repeat itself in schools, Arthur says.
“Leaning purely on vaccination rates is not going to be good enough. We need the classrooms to be updated, we need the ventilations to be updated and we need a preparedness plan”.
In Kingston, the last time students and teachers were in class was early April.
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