Skip to content

School divisions continue plans for September reopen

With the Saskatchewan government’s release of their Safe Schools Plan, local school divisions continue to work on what their reopening will look like. Saskatchewan Education Minister and Deputy Premier Gordon Wyant spoke on Aug.
school kids pic

With the Saskatchewan government’s release of their Safe Schools Plan, local school divisions continue to work on what their reopening will look like.

Saskatchewan Education Minister and Deputy Premier Gordon Wyant spoke on Aug. 4 about eight areas teachers and staff will be focusing on to keep children safe as they head back to school.

Attempts to go back to school as close to normal as possible does not include mandatory mask use or smaller class sizes, but teachers and staff will organize classes with as little in-school movement and class mixing as possible.

A normal and reassuring environment for students, especially younger ones, is what the government is aiming for, said Saskatchewan’s Chief Medical Health Officer, Dr. Saqib Shahab. This as close to a normal classroom environment as possible is dependent on transmissions rates in the province remaining low, as seen in Saskatchewan daycares.

“The plan as outlined today, and as you know designed during July to be released today, takes into account that when you have low transmission, which is what we had in May June, you can safely start school without the use of masks in every grade.”

If schools are seeing high transmission rates, alternative options like mandatory mask use, smaller in-school capacity, and mandatory remote learning will be implemented under the advice of Dr. Shahab.

“Those things may well come to fruition, we may well have to reduce class sizes,” says Wyant. “We may well have to put other things in place to ensure that the school settings are safe, but that's really based on a community transmission model and it will be based on the advice of the chief medical health officer.”

The North East School Division has relatively small schools, says Director of Education, Don Rempel, so breaking grades down into small cohorts makes sense. With schools of between 30-150 students, this model will keep students together with little mixing, he says.

“We have close school communities ... Students only interact through the day with their grade students or the existing class, we don’t have a lot of mixing, then we should be able to trace contact rates back if there's somebody that's exposed to the illness.”

If the Ministry of Education is advising schools to return to mandatory remote learning, Rempel says teachers have been trained in Google Classroom and Moodle for students to use at home. With contingencies in place, Rempel says they much better prepared for remote learning than they were in March and April.

“We're really invested in the contingency that all of our staff will have all of our students trained on how to work in an online environment in the first weeks of school. So if we happen to go to a blended model or to full remote learning, we'll have students prepared for that.”

Compared to previous years, the entire school day will change for students with high school students having three classes a day in the same room while elementary school students will remain in the same classroom throughout class time. High touch surfaces will be cleaned when needed, however, students staying in the same space and not changing desks or classrooms will cut back on cleaning needs.

With the plan relying on low transmission rates of the virus, Rempel says they need families to continue following the advice of Saskatchewan Chief Medical Officer and reduce the spread throughout the community.