The popularity of online learning in Hastings and Prince Edward has thrown a few curve balls at the senior administration of the Hastings Prince Edward District School Board this year.
On top of dealing with a pandemic, Director of Education Sean Monteith says they as a board have had to make some tough decisions while maintaining their mantra of putting students first.
He took some time to speak to Quinte News and explain how the board has gotten here and why they have made some of the decisions they have.
A survey of families conducted in August showed 84% of parents would be sending their child(ren) to school on September 3.
A virtual school was then created for those in kindergarten to grade 12 for the approximately 1,800 students who would not be attending classes physically.
On Monday night, during their monthly public board meeting, Monteith said the interest in virtual learning has spiked, which is leading those at the senior administration level to make some hard choices.
One of those decisions is asking families to pick between physically attending school or attending virtually and being unable to change that decision until the semester is over on January 28, 2021.
“Unfortunately, you’re either in or you’re out. If parents want to pull their kids out of the virtual school and put them into the physical school that’s probably easier to accommodate because we are going to have the space at the school. What we can’t have is parents who are in the physical school and say they have the right to pull out and go remote. Well they do, but they’re not going to get into the virtual school,” Monteith told Quinte News on Tuesday afternoon.
A decision has to be made by parents by 3 p.m. on Wednesday, September 30.
Parents will be able to change their mind for the second part of the school year which begins January 29, 2021. The cut-off date for that decision to be made is Wednesday, January 20, 2021.
He says this keeps families from going back and forth between in-school and virtual because of the challenges it creates staffing the virtual school.
“The problem is that we still have three quarters if not more of our kids in school, so we still have to have our teachers there,” Monteith explained.
“But we’ve added another 1,600 kids into a virtual school, soon to be 2,400, so we had to hire more teachers which is a huge cost, and on top of it, we still have some classes in elementary of ten kids. So what happens is, when you have five or six hundred more kids coming out of our schools and going into a virtual school in five weeks, that requires us to find another 25 teachers. So we either pull them out of the physical school, which is completely disruptive, meaning another reorganization there or we hire some, which we don’t have. Or we find magic, pixie dust. And that’s kind of what we’re dealing with.”
He says all the options in front of the board are bad and they have to pick the best of the options available.
Monteith did note that closing schools is not an option, except in the case of an outbreak of COVID-19 or a high number of staff absences because they are awaiting COVID testing results, because they are not going to bounce kids around from school to school.
Hastings and Prince Edward District School Board Director of Education Sean Monteith. (Photo: David Foot / Quinte News)
He said instead, if a school had so few students in attendance, they would be more likely to make the decision to reduce the number of staff there and reassign them to the virtual school or other schools that are not seeing such a significant drop in attendance.
Monteith told Quinte News he understands that the decisions parents and families are making are extremely difficult and challenging and are influenced by multiple factors.
“All I would offer from my perspective as Director is that the decisions we have to make are among some of the most difficult that I’ve ever had to make and are not without a lot of thought and a lot of careful consideration of the consequences and the unintended consequences of these actions.”
He says there’s not somebody asleep at the wheel, indiscriminately or flippantly making these decisions, as he realizes every decision made affects lives.
“People are more willing to accept a difficult decision and one they don’t like if at least they understand that you’ve made the decision and why you’ve made the decision, as opposed to not explaining yourself at all,” Monteith says.
Currently, of 1,200 students at the elementary level and slightly under 500 at the secondary level, hundreds of students are on a waiting list and 614 more students are expected to enter virtual learning, with 384 in elementary and 288 in secondary.
You can find Monteith’s most recent letter to parent/guardians from Monday here.
