EDITOR'S NOTE: A previous version of this story contained comments from a source indicating that the Simcoe County District School Board declined a request at their Aug. 26 meeting to re-allocate some of the $12.2 million reserve funding toward back-to-school safety procedures.
The board received a delegation on the subject for information, and did not consider a motion to re-allocate funds at that meeting.
CollingwoodToday apologizes for this error.
The No. 1 concern a local teachers' union has about going back to school is a lack of physical distancing.
Jen Hare, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation (OSSTF) bargaining unit president for Simcoe County, said the impossibility of a two-metre buffer is a major health-and-safety sticking point for many local teachers.
The escalating conflict between Premier Doug Ford's government and four major teacher unions reached a tipping point on Monday when the unions announced they are taking the province to the labour board. The unions allege Ontario's school reopening plan violates its own workplace safety laws.
“This shouldn’t be a political issue,” Hare said Monday. “We want to go back to work. We want some normalcy for ourselves and for our students. What we need to do is take the politics out of this.
“If we have to go to the labour board to get those resolutions and have honest conversations that should have been happening the whole time, then that’s the step that we have to take," she added. "We need it not to be the teachers unions versus the government versus the school boards. We should all be working together to make sure everybody is safe."
The unions — which represent 190,000 teachers and education workers — said Monday morning that they all plan to file complaints after meetings with Ontario government failed to address their concerns last week.
The Association des enseignantes et des enseignants franco-ontariens, the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (ETFO), the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association (OECTA), and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation (OSSTF) all allege the school reopening plan does not take "every reasonable precaution" to protect workers from COVID-19.
Locally, health and safety concerns are on the minds of many teachers. Hare says there are certain types of classrooms, such as science labs, where students sit shoulder-to-shoulder.
“We have classes up to 36 students. There is absolutely no ability to physically distance between the teacher and the students, and the students to each other," she said.
While Hare says she knows the school boards are doing their best considering the plans are changing at such a rapid pace, she also says there are ways teachers could be more supported by local boards.
“We haven’t had the time and the work hasn’t been done to access all the funding that could be available,” she said.
Teachers' unions, school boards and some parents say the province must lower elementary class sizes and fund class size reductions, instead of insisting boards dip into their own reserve funds to lease extra space or hire additional staff to promote physical distancing.
Hare points to a delegation she did before the Simcoe County District School Board last week where she asked for the board to consider reallocating some of its $12.2 million in reserve funds to schools. The board received the delegation for information but did not consider a motion to reallocate.
“I get that they want to keep some money for a rainy day, but it’s pouring and we need some support,” said Hare.
The province's strategy will see students in kindergarten through Grade 8 return to school without any reduction in class sizes, though students will spend the day in a single cohort to limit contact with other children.
Most high schoolers will also be in class full-time, though students at some boards across the province will take half their courses online in a bid to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
Last week, the teachers' unions had asked the Ministry of Labour to issue a series of workplace orders to set safety standards in schools, setting a Friday deadline for the government.
The unions said the Ministry of Labour, which oversees workplaces in the province, should order standards which mandate 15 to 20 students per class, to ensure a two-metre distance can be maintained between pupils. They said an order establishing a maximum cohort of 50 students should be set and along with busing standards which take precautions against COVID-19.
Hare points to the slow increase in local COVID-19 cases over the past week being concerning.
“We need to know we have made every reasonable effort to make sure people are safe and at this point, it hasn’t happened,” she said.
— With files from Canadian Press
