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Serious Concerns During First Week of Reopening of Schools in Quebec The Challenge that Teachers and Education Workers Are FacingOn August 31, schools in Quebec reopened, from kindergarten to high school. There are 2,736 public educational institutions with 1,216,791 students, 107,744 teachers, and more than 60,000 support staff and education professionals.
However, the return to the classroom was also marked by anxiety. The anxiety is not just because of the seriousness of the COVID-19 crisis, but also because the government is evading its responsibility to protect the health and safety of everyone in the school system. Teachers are very concerned about the clash between the actual conditions in the schools and what the government claims are appropriate measures in place at the beginning of the school year. Indeed, despite all the proposals from teachers on how to organize for students to be in school while respecting physical distancing, essential to the control of the pandemic, the government and its Ministry of Education have declared that physical distancing is not necessary in classrooms and nor is the wearing of masks. The concept of the whole class as a bubble disregards all the efforts of teachers to have smaller class sizes and physical distancing within the classroom to protect everyone. The efforts of the teachers were rejected without explanation or justification.
At the same time the government is talking about laxness in the schools and even talking about closing them down if things get worse, for which it will blame education staff or young people and avoid public scrutiny of its own decisions. This type of public relations cover-up is despised by teachers and their colleagues who have to teach and ensure the safety of all on a daily basis without any confidence or sense of security that the government is taking concrete action to support them. This convinces teachers that they need to step up their actions to hold the government accountable and to force it to assume its responsibilities. At the same time, they have taken ownership of the issue of health and safety for all, a responsibility they have taken up from the moment they set foot in their schools. Teachers see the need to create opportunities to collectively discuss and exchange views and share experiences to work out what can be done to change the situation in a way that benefits the people.
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The first feature of this back-to-school period, with COVID-19 not
under control, is the immense social love and enthusiasm that teachers
demonstrated when welcoming their students. As soon as they set foot in
the school, they made sure that hand sanitizer and personal
protective equipment were available for everyone, and every day
since teachers have been working collectively on initiatives that
ensure their health and that of their students, thereby also looking
after the health of the community. They have only had a few days,
working together, to ensure that the back-to-school period is as safe
as possible to protect the health of young people and is also
appropriate for
teaching. The students, especially those in secondary school, many who
worked in food and retail during the summer under COVID-19, are using
their experience and are very disciplined in following and enforcing
safety rules.
The other phenomenon that
adds to the anxiety is the constant public
relations assault of the Quebec government. In this very difficult
situation they tell the public that the situation is under control and
the teachers are satisfied. Minister of Education Jean-François
Roberge was quoted in the media on September 3, saying: "The echo I get
is that
teachers and staff are satisfied, things are going well, and with each
passing day, the level of anxiety is decreasing and people are more and
more reassured." He said this on the very day the government made
public the list of 47 schools that had reported cases of COVID-19
during the first week of school. In elementary schools over 20
students,
and in secondary schools often more than 30, spend more than five hours a
day together in classrooms without any physical distancing! Teachers are
concerned because these are conditions that promote the transmission of
the virus.