EAST CENTRAL — The Horizon School Division is counting the return to school as a success thanks to the diligence of teachers, principals, staff and students.
“I have to tell you, our kids have been amazing,” said Kevin Garinger, the division’s director of education. “They've just done a wonderful job of ensuring that they were wearing their masks where they needed to and they're trying to mitigate issues around transmission by using good hand hygiene, physical distancing, and being forward facing in classrooms.”
When Garinger talked to the Humboldt Journal on Oct. 23, there were no confirmed cases within a Horizon School Division school, though Foam Lake Elementary was closed for a day because somebody connected to the school had COVID-19. Later on Oct. 23, the division announced there was a confirmed diagnosis in an individual at Viscount Central School. School sports have been suspended as a precaution.
If there is an outbreak at a school, if there are two or more children within a classroom diagnosed with the disease, the director of education said they are ready to switch to distance learning using tools such as Google classroom.
“I think I can't say enough about our teachers and our staff. I got to tell you that they are well prepared for the potential of an outbreak in our schools.”
Garinger said he’s been told by schools that they are happy with the amount of personal protective equipment that's been made available. Schools and buses are being sanitized between uses.
As of Oct. 15, there are 6,313 students in the division. Over 5,900 of those are physically at school, 233 students are taking distance learning programs and there’s around 70 more students taking homeschooling than usual. A few students have left the division to take distance programs like Flex ED.
There’s been a few challenges the division has had to face, Garinger said, like getting everybody used to the processes needed to operate a school during a pandemic.
“It's always a challenge when you're implementing something new and it takes time to get to where it needs to be, but we’re happy with where we are.”
Securing technology to enable distance learning is also a challenge.
“As we're ordering technology, there's been a challenge, because it's just not readily available,” Garinger said.
Another challenge is the size of the division, which happens to contain five administrative health networks of the Saskatchewan Health Authority. Garinger said the division has been lucky enough to have strong ties to those health networks.
“Our health folks have just been absolutely tremendous and we've had great support from our directors of primary health across our system.”
The school division has had extra expenses this year, which includes more teachers to administer distance learning, more custodians, more technology costs and more need of substitutes as teachers remain at home if they are sick.
Garinger said the provincial government has been supportive. In September, the division received $1.27 million in additional funding to deal with the pandemic. The director of education said there will be a chance in December to apply for additional pandemic funding.
