STEPHEN RICCIO
PONTIAC Oct. 14, 2020
Since the return to school in September, elementary schools have had to navigate keeping classroom bubbles intact while continuing the operation of daycare programs.
While schools in more densely populated areas might have the numbers to justify supervision of students while maintaining classroom bubbles, elementary schools throughout the Pontiac . . .
don’t have that luxury.
“Unlike big city daycares that can maintain bubbles, so I’m thinking of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau School in town in Aylmer that probably has 250 kids in a day; they maintain the classroom bubbles, but in small daycares across the province, the attempt is to try to maintain some kind of distancing,” Dr. S.E. McDowell Elementary Principal Grady Robson said. “But realistically each becomes its own bubble.”
Stewart Aitken, director of educational services at the Western Quebec School Board (WQSB), said that the province structures daycare programs so that there is one educator for every 20 students, and no more than one educator until there are more than 20 students.
“If you can in fact put children together, if they’re in the same classroom, into the same group in the daycare when groups are being formed, you do it,” he said. “The reality is in many of our daycares, that’s just simply not possible.”
Aitken explained that all four elementary schools within the Pontiac — Onslow, Dr. S.E. McDowell, St. John’s and Dr. Wilbert Keon — are having to merge classroom bubbles during the before and after school periods.
Robson said he is satisfied with how McDowell has managed daycare under these circumstances.
“What I see when I’ve been in the daycare inside the building, kids are sitting in different parts of the room and there’s social distancing going on between the different parts of a great big room,” he said.
“In my estimation, we’re doing a good job to avoid cross-contamination.”
Aitken said that students bussing to and from school must deal with a similar situation of being in the same space as others from separate class bubbles.
He added that smaller schools having to cope with this daycare reality is in line with the provincial government’s guidelines that were laid out in August.
“That’s under the current guidelines right now, who knows in the future if in fact that’s going to change, we don’t know,” he said.
