Urge the Ministry of Education to fund virtual learning & make in-person classes safer!
Urge the Ministry of Education to fund virtual learning & make in-person classes safer!
Classes for kids under age 12 are less safe now than they were last year.
“What I can confirm is we are ensuring every board in Ontario will provide that choice of virtual learning experience.” - Stephen Lecce, Minister of Education, May 4, 2021.(1)
Every student will have access to virtual learning this school year, according to the Minister of Education, Stephen Lecce. Sounds good, right? Except the follow up to that is the ministry will not put any funds towards virtual learning. So boards have to offer virtual learning, with no budget to support it.
For elementary schools in the Toronto District School Board, the implications of that are:
- teachers have been plucked from their assigned classrooms, a week before school starts, to teach virtual classes.
- the remaining in-person classes were consolidated, making class sizes much larger (30+ students).
- in most of those classes, it is physically impossible to social distance.
- these are students who are not even eligible to be vaccinated yet.
- students with learning or developmental disabilities are being forced into hybrid learning, now called 'simultaneous learning'.
Stephen Lecce's decision not to fund virtual learning this year has made elementary classrooms less safe than they were last year. And the most vulnerable students, those with learning and developmental disabilities, will have to share a teacher with remote and in-person students, giving them a lower quality of education. The fight against hybrid classes isn't over. Renaming it and pushing it on the most vulnerable students isn't acceptable. This is inequitable and just gross.
Elementary students in Ontario deserve to have their public education funded by the government, as it is the ministry's mandate(2), whether they choose in-person or virtual learning this year.
It is outrageous that the Minister of Education has simply chosen not to fund virtual learning for elementary students, who are not eligible for the vaccine yet, when the global pandemic continues and the Delta variant is pushing Covid case numbers up every day in our communities.
No parent wants their unvaccinated elementary student crammed into a classroom with 30+ other unvaccinated children, where social distancing isn't possible. And no parents, students or teachers want hybrid (or simultaneous) learning.
We're urging the Ministry of Education to fund virtual learning for elementary school students in Ontario this school year!