OTTAWA -- Trustees in the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board voted Tuesday night to delay the start of the school year until Sept. 8, pushing the first day of school back by five days.
In a nearly five-hour meeting Tuesday, which also included a lengthy debate on whether to make masks mandatory for students in Kindergarten to Grade 3, trustees agreed unanimously to an amended motion to begin a staggered start to the school year after Labour Day instead of before it.
The original motion by trustee Donna Blackburn had called for school to begin on Sept. 14, aligning with the start of yellow school bus transportation, but the motion was amended to being the staggered start on the eighth instead.
Teachers, staff, and students are returning to classes in a brand new environment of physical distancing, regular handwashing and other strict pandemic protection measures. Blackburn said when presenting her motion that teachers have argued that the three professional development days from Aug. 31 to Sept. 2 did not give them enough time to prepare their classrooms, which would be markedly different than before.
Speaking at the OCDSB special meeting Tuesday, Blackburn said she was also concerned about the lack of school bus transportation before Sept. 14.
"We will not have bus service until the next week, which means that some of our marginalized students whose families don't have cars, or whose parents have to make a living and can't drive their kids to school, those kids won't be in school. That's very problematic for me," she said. "The students are anxious enough and the notion that they won't be able to attend because they don't have the transportation, they will feel way behind before they even get to school."
Blackburn, however, did vote in favour of the amended motion.
The OCDSB's plan prior to this change had included starting some students in class on Sept. 3 and staggering the first day of school by grade between Sept. 3 and Sept. 14. Therefore, this change would only affect students who would have started on Sept. 3 or Sept. 4, but would also likely delay the final days of the staggered rollout to the 17th or 18th.
The exact start dates for each grade have yet to be made public by the board. The OCDSB said before Tuesday's change that more information will be provided from each child's school in the last week of August.
Speaking on CTV Morning Live on Wednesday morning, trustee Mark Fisher said it was clear that teachers and staff needed extra time to prepare.
"I've always been firm in saying that this isn't a rigid plan and if staff needed some flexibility, I wanted to make sure to provide it," he said. "That's ultimately the decision we made last night, to give them a bit more time and I think that's the right thing to do."
Trustee Justine Bell said the plan the OCDSB has will go ahead, but cautioned parents to expect additional changes.
"We have a shifting landscape, we're in the middle of a pandemic and what we heard from Public Health is we need to gather evidence of what works so, yes, we have a plan, we’re going to move forward and there will likely be changes on the horizon," she said.
Fisher added that he does not expect significant changes to the back to school plan unless the nature of the pandemic changes.
"I wouldn't anticipate substantive changes unless we run into a situation where we get into a second wave of the pandemic and we're having to make core structural changes and we have to send all our kids back home, or if we're doing better during the pandemic and there's a conversation of potentially more kids coming back to school," he said.
