It was in bitter cold that the students returned to class on Tuesday, after a month’s absence, made up of vacations and then school at home. Around the Hélène-Boullé primary school in Montreal, it was to wonder which of the children or the parents were the happiest of the reopening of the schools.
Posted at 10:30 a.m.
Coming to drive her son home, Andrée-Anne Gratton said she was confident that the return to class would be safe.
“We are very happy, especially for the children, but for the parents it’s great! To see our children finally reunited with their friends is the ideal,” the mother said.
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A mother replaces her daughter’s backpack.
Online school was “really boring,” observed her son Edgar, who is in third grade.
Other parents were more ambivalent. “It’s a relief to be back, it’s good for the children, but I have fears too,” said Sarah, who came to pick up her eight-year-old child. The fact that her three-year-old is not vaccinated weighs in the balance, she explained.
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Julie helps her daughter Iris to step over a mound of snow in front of the entrance to the schoolyard.
Teacher of 6e year, Gabriel Stasse said he was happy to see his students in person.
“We are in a fairly privileged environment, but I know that the parents of certain students do not have the means to supervise them as much as the others when the school is at a distance. It increases the gap and I expect to have to work twice as hard for these students,” explained Mr. Stasse.
He was nevertheless “shared” by this return due to health rules which he considers insufficient.
“This morning, I’m going to test my windows to see if I can open them. The windows freeze [quand il fait froid], in that time we can just open the door”, says the teacher. When windows are open too long in very cold weather, it becomes impossible to close them, he added.
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A mother gives a hug to her daughter who is in 2nd grade.
A return that could have been safer, say unions
The teachers’ unions would have liked the return to take place with more protection for their members.
“The feeling of security among teachers is not there at all this morning,” said Mélanie Hubert, president of the West Montreal Teachers’ Union (SEOM). “In the context where there is an overflow in hospitals, we wonder about the relaxation of sanitary measures in schools. We come back with fewer measures than we had in December, ”said Mme Hubert.
She cites the incomplete installation of the CO readers2 in classes. When it comes to air quality, “COVID has a wide back,” she says, recalling that the poor state of schools was known long before the pandemic.
President of the Alliance of Teachers of Montreal, Catherine Beauvais-St-Pierre believes that it is not “a good idea to go back to school today”. She cites the masks, which could be of better quality, and the ventilation problems in the classrooms.
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The President of the Alliance of Teachers of Montreal, Catherine Beauvais St-Pierre.
As for the management of COVID-19 cases and the isolation of symptomatic students, “everything is based on rapid tests”. “You have to have a lot of trust in the parents of our students. Confidence that the tests were done and that they were negative,” says Mme Beauvais St-Pierre.