Covid-19 Planning Update
Below, please find the highlights from our Special Committee of the Whole held on June 23 - to view the meeting in its entirety,
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Planning for September - We have been working on three scenarios, remote, hybrid (adaptive), and full return to school. Last Saturday, the Minister clarified that the Ministry expectation is all boards start in an adaptive model. Please note that the TDSB does not make this decision - we follow the direction of the Ministry.
We are engaging students, staff and parents now and getting good insights. Survey closes June 30. Health and safety remain at the forefront. We have 13 subcommittees meeting on a regular basis. Each subcommittee is developing plans using the framework: identifying the knowns and unknowns, with further discussion with Toronto Public Health (TPH) who have agreed to be part of our planning table. Draft plans are brought to the steering committee and will be put together into one plan for the TDSB that will have been vetted by TPH. See timeline - For details
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Questions for Clarification:
Can you provide clarity, is 15 a hard cap, what happens if there is a class of 33? That is still one of our unknowns and is on the list. The number 15 comes from the scientific modelling.
When we begin polling parents about intentions to return, are we considering polling earlier about transportation? Yes, we are going to poll the parents much earlier who already receive transportation.
Lost at how teachers will teach through this - may have a group of parents who will not want their children coming back at all (remote learning), some teachers having kids coming half time, are we doubling the number of teachers? Is there any insight into this at this point or will that be coming at another time? Families have to decide if we are in an adaptive model if they are coming or not. If they are not, we may assign a teacher, who for reasons needs to be at home, to support these students who chose to be at home. This is part of the contingency planning. Families decide if students are coming back to the building or remain in remote. If they come back in an adaptive model, they will be at school some of the time and be given work on the other days to do when they are not in the building. For further clarity, when you are talking about the remote learning piece, those children will get remote learning which may include synchronous learning. If family chooses remote, they will have a teacher but it won’t be the classroom teacher they would have had if they were in school.
Possible models for schools in the Fall. Some discussion earlier about kids being in cohorts weekly vs every other day. Do we have to have deep clean between each group of 15 that comes each day? One of the models being discussed is one cohort comes Monday-Tuesday / Deep Clean Wednesday / 2nd cohort come Thursday-Friday. Part of our contingency planning, not confirmed. The few times we have cohort changes, the better it is from facilities perspective and health and safety perspective.
On the week of July 27th, we will ask parents about their intentions of going back to school. Are we presenting them a draft so they can make an informed decision? We will have the information from our July 17th draft report that we will incorporate into a survey. We should have enough information to provide to families to let them know what it will look like in September so they can make an informed decision.
If you have a class of 20, and of the 20, 5 have decided they are not comfortable returning. Do we then continue with two classes adaptive or would they come every day? Under the adaptive model, we may still have them follow an adaptive model.
Do we anticipate doing this differently? For the French and Gifted because these are optional programs? All of these possibilities are being explored in the sub-committees. We are determining the impacts of these changes.
Does it mean we will be asking for a reduction in the number of instructional hours, if students are not in front of a teacher? That is something we would need to ask and the Deputy is cognizant of this.
What does it mean for secondary and semestered schools. If there is an 2nd wave, would this be the best or would non-semestered across the Board be better? We do have 25 schools that are full year schools and the remaining are semestered with a few that are quad-mestered. At this time, quad-mestering seems to the best option and we are looking at 2 courses per quadmester. We are meeting later this week to see if IB schools could move to this model. Will provide you with more details for what is best for secondary students.
Caretaking staff, what is the capacity like for caretaking staff? With our current compliment of staff, we would not have enough allocation to do the enhanced cleaning required. There are different models being looked at and caretaking will be front and centre in how the models will work. We have to ensure our students and staff are safe.
If we are going with the adaptive model, who is providing child care on the days where younger kids won’t be in school? Has this been brought up at the Ministry? The Minister has been asked this at a press conference and an answer has not been given. We do not have the funds to provide child care on the off days.
Regarding devices, are we going to see every child with a device? That is our ultimate goal, may be some budgetary decisions that have to be made.
Child Care - One of our key goals throughout this planning is to ensure that TDSB plays a role in supporting child care centres who want to re-open to children in July and August. There are 320 schools with some form of child care that would normally operate over the summer. Third party child care staff were invited to return to their exclusive space to plan for reopening based on the guidelines and directions provided by the Ministry & TPH. When centres are ready to reopen they are required to submit an attestation to the Ministry that they’ve met the criteria. TDSB staff from Child Care and Facilities works closely with City staff to ensure that there is a clarity of roles and responsibilities with regards to health and safety in particular cleaning routines which are fundamental to a safe reopening. Effective July 2 TDSB will be ready to support any child care centre that has the required authorization to reopen to children. The information shared this evening will be communicated to child care operators tomorrow morning.
Summer Camps - Senior staff met with City staff regarding accommodating a modified summer camp program called CampTO. They approached us with a proposal to run summer camps in 60 locations across TDSB. Geographic location and needs were the basis for how the 60 were selected. They will start registration for the camps tomorrow morning, with a July 13th start date. We noticed there were conflicts with the CampTO locations and 255 childcares that indicated that they wished to reopen over the summer. We were able to work through this issue with help from our permit unit and City staff. This cooperation between the City and the TDSB Early Years and Permits will allow us to operate both the camps and the childcares at all of the requested locations. We will be setting up a working group with City staff from PFR and Children’s Services, and TDSB staff from Facilities and Early Years to work out any details around cleaning, access etc.
In addition to Childcare and CampTO, we currently have 126 additional requests for permits for summer camps at 91 locations. Unfortunately 65 of these locations conflict with CampTO and Childcares and we would not be able to accommodate them. We are evaluating our capabilities with caretaking staff for cleaning to determine if we can accommodate any additional indoor permits, over and above Childcare and CampTO.
We also have requests for 330 field permits at 166 TDSB schools. These permits occur during the evening after 6:00 pm and do not interfere with childcares and camp permits. Part of the difficulty with approving field permits are concerns with individuals continuing to use our field inappropriately and not following guidelines on size of gatherings. The only use approved by the Province is for individual training, with appropriate physical distancing. Permits for large scale practices, scrimmages and games are not permitted. We don’t currently have the capability of monitoring inappropriate use. All permits are currently cancelled until the end of June and we are reviewing if we can allow additional community use of schools permits to begin in July. This decision will have to be made shortly in order to give permit holders time to organize their programming and notify participants.
Summer School Update - We are still in the process of collecting registration information from each summer school site. Many parents wait until they see their child’s/children’s report card before making a decision about registering for summer school. The expectation is that principals and teachers will reach out to parents of students registered for summer school towards the end of this week and into next week. Summer school begins on July 6th.
Focus on Youth Update - We mentioned last week we were putting together a proposal. We received a soft approval from the Ministry on our proposal. The province has had a total of $8M and we got $3.08M, the majority used to hire students. This year we were told to look at $1.5M, our proposal was submitted for $1.8M. We are looking at hiring students for caretaking, grounds and summer school mentoring. $300 K allocated from the $1.8M for summer employment. We are also looking at students who were part of Focus on Youth last year to see if they are looking for employment this year.
Professional Learning - We have learned a lot in the last three months with our fully remote environment. We know with the 3 scenarios, there will be a need to ensure all of the teachers are up and running on digital platforms. We will be using Brightspace and Google Classrooms. Part of our plan is to use the survey to engage our educators to determine basic professional learning needs. Our administrators will work with their staff to create a continuum to know where their staff are on the continuum as well as school based supports. Part of our plan is also reaching out to principals of schools where effective practices have been going on these last 3 months so we have models we can use as best practices. We are in a time sensitive crunch with professional learning with two summer institutes planned - webinar based learning will get us started. This was a high level overview and will have more details coming in July.
Questions for clarification -
Given the child care piece and potential loss of spaces, remain concerned that in the need to ensure health and safety requirements, there will a loss of opportunity for kids. The child cares, camps and permit applications, how are we communicating our role in this to the communities? Want to make sure that TDSB is not seen as the obstacle to the opportunities for their children. All of the points are very well taken. We are currently grappling with what we can provide. We also have capacity constraints. We are in the process and by the end of the week we should be in a position to know what we have the capacity for. We won’t be able to accommodate what we could accommodate in the past. We will start working on the communication plan this week and will clearly explain what our limitations were.
Considering all schools are expected to work under the adaptive model in the Fall, what is our realistic expectation from community use of schools perspective in the Fall? What can we tell the permit holders that traditionally have permits through the school year, when they can use the schools? We are grappling with the cohort issue. We try to maximize the permits use. There will be a higher level of cleaning required between use. It will reduce the amount of opportunities for our schools to be permitted. Groups may have to go to alternate schools, which may not be their first choice, to reduce the enhanced cleaning required.
Regular permit holder in our schools for years, this year concerned they will lose the seniority of being approved in the future as they will not be in the school this year? They are wondering if they should permit it and not use it? We will take this is away and follow up.
Math Curriculum Announcement - How do we support given everything else that is going on in terms of the professional learning staff will require to teach the new curriculum? Or is there some ability to say give us a few months to figure out what we are doing. The Director noted the Directors did push on this with the Deputy Minister; the DM noted the Ministry wanted the curriculum out so it could be read over the summer. We need time for professional learning and we won’t be doing professional learning on math in September and October. Insights and information was received, further information to come. Clarification - It seems the Ministry expectation is for September implementation - I do not understand how this can be possible when actual transition back to school during COVID-19 must be everyone’s focus. Please note I will be presenting an Emergency Motion at our special meeting on July 9, 2020 asking both the Chair and Director to request a delay in implementation.