Front Burner - Schools reopen in Quebec amid rise in COVID-19 cases

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

While most Canadian students head back to school next week, classes in Quebec have already resumed. But, just a few days in, there are already COVID-19 cases being recorded in schools, and teachers and parents voicing frustrations and fears about the province’s back-to-school plans. All this comes against the backdrop of rising coronavirus cases in the province. Today, host Josh Bloch talks to Allison Hanes, city columnist with the Montreal Gazette, as we explore what Quebec’s experience so far might tell us about back-to-school challenges ahead for the rest of the country.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. So students will enter the building. They're going to stand on the spots. So these are the distant spots.

They will come in. We have our stop sign. So it going to stand on the spots. So these are the distant spots. They will come in. We have our stop sign. So it says, please use hand sanitizer. So they will stop and sanitize their hands. Most Canadian students head back to school next week, but classes have already resumed in Quebec. The majority of students in French school started late last week,

and those in English schools in Quebec start to go back this week. It's going to be different, and I'm going to see my friends, and there's going to be new teachers. I know it's going to be not easy and maybe a little bit chaotic or something, but not horrible. Just a few days in, and a few schools have already recorded COVID-19 cases. And dozens of students are in isolation.

There are three cases confirmed at two high schools in Quebec City. Among students, 81 students now sent home to isolate. 20 teachers from Polyvalente de Montagne have been ordered into isolation as a precaution. The government says they are monitoring the outbreaks closely and are willing to shut schools if necessary. On top of the confirmed COVID cases, there is also growing criticism from teachers and parents about the province's back-to-school plan.

Today, what Quebec's experience so far might tell us about back-to-school challenges ahead for the rest of the country. I'm Josh Bloch. This is FrontBurner. Hello, Alison. Hello. I want to start with your personal experience, actually. You're a parent of two young children, one's in kindergarten, and one is entering grade five. And you did this week, what many parents, maybe most parents across the country will be doing in the coming weeks, you actually dropped your kids off at school.

I'm curious to know, what was that experience like? Well, it was, it was nerve wracking. But at the same time, I felt like the schools did their utmost to roll out the red carpet. And I also felt a certain sense of relief from having my kids home for most of the last six months. Right. my older one going to class, being with other kids, being in a classroom setting, getting stimulation that wasn't coming from a screen and getting outdoors and just resuming those normal rites of passage. So there were nerves, but there was also relief. I know you've also spoken with a lot of other parents about their concerns and their experience of starting to send their kids back to school.

What have they been telling you? Well, I think people fall into one of three camps in Quebec. There's people like myself who are, you know, biting the bullet and doing it. Reservations about the plan aside, feeling the need to see our kids back in the classroom and back with their friends, but knowing the risks and trying our best to mitigate them. I feel like it's going to be really directed, you know, there are going to be teachers and people to help us. It's a new reality

and I think we're very resilient and it's it's happening so you know might as well get on for the ride and hopefully it's going to end within the next few months. Then there's people who are just want no part of going back to school they've withdrawn their children they're homeschooling them and and they're taking that on on their own because Quebec has not offered the option of distance learning for students without a medical exemption. If they are some vulnerability medical and a doctor has a paper to say, OK, these kids have some sickness related to COVID. He has right to have learning from a distance.

So I imagine there's only a minimal number of medical exemptions, so you're either in or you're out. And then there's another group, subgroup, I guess, of the homeschoolers who are actually trying to take the government to court to fight for the right to remote learning provided by the public education system. I don't understand how we can so forcefully insist that people hand over their children on a hope and a prayer without also convincing them that you've really done everything you can

to make that space safe. And then I guess there's a couple other smaller groups like those were, I know there's a few parents who are taking a wait and see approach, like they kind of would like to send their children back, but they're probably going to wait a week or two to see how things go. And then there's, you know, obviously people go to private school where they're, you know, they have a little more say in how they set things up. Right. Well, I want to tell me a little bit more about the province's plan for this school reopening. You don't have to tell me every detail, but give me a sense of what they're doing to try and ensure that this is a safe return to school. For those going back, each class has its own bubble. So within the class, the students will be separated, but

the bubble will be their cluster of their class. So they will remain in their classes and the staff will be moving and coming into the classes rather than the students moving around. Students in grade five and up are required to wear masks, but not in the classroom. Face covering will not be mandatory within classroom it's important to say so. It won't be mandatory in rooms used as cafeteria while students or staff are eating and drinking of course. And they're trying to keep classes apart from each other and avoid circulation in the hallways such as they eat lunch in their classroom now and depending on the size of the the yard that each school has, their recesses are

staggered. They have students entering and exiting the building from different doors. We have a few staircases. So what we did was we created an up and down staircase. Eventually, you know, some of the kids will have to cross a little bit, but for the most part, we're making it very clear which side of the hallway that they're supposed to be on. They're supposed to stay two meters away from other adults. Schools that have the ability or the capacity I think are trying to use their outdoor space to the best of their ability. Not all schools especially in you know inner city Montreal have that luxury but that's about it. So we've got some visuals for the students.

And as you'll see also in the classes as well. So reminders. We also have a disinfectant here to clean their hands and reminders of how to do so. Those are the measures that they're taking. So when you talk about a classroom being a bubble, the students inside that class aren't required to socially distance from one another, but are supposed to remain two

meters away from the teacher. Two meters away from the teacher, but they do not have to socially distance at any point. So that is one of the bones of contention, one of the points of controversy, because that edict has evolved. Because when parts of Quebec outside of greater Montreal went back to school last spring students were required to be one meter apart at all times you know from each other but there were less kids in the class at that point so and then when they announced the back to school plan at the end of the school year in June initially they said there would be pods of six within each class so six kids in each class would be in a group that didn't have to socially distance,

but they would have to socially distance from other groups of six students within their class. So for various reasons, perhaps the impracticality of enforcing that or the lack of space, they seem to have jettisoned that and we're just back to each class being its own bubble. What were the lessons that were learned from that earlier reopening that is shaping the

way that the reopening is happening now? Well, that's an interesting question because you think it really would be the template on which they would reopen for good now. But things really changed. The reopening plan in the spring offered online learning for those who didn't want to go back. And yeah, the lack of uptake, I think, naturally kind of reduced the crowding in the classroom. So it went fine. It went successfully. I think if there was any lesson, it was that actually the kids who went back were quite

happy to be there. And I actually, this isn't the school, but in the summer when daycare reopened, I sent my daughter back for a few weeks of closure. And that went very well too, you know, just with the protocols in place. Obviously, it's a smaller setting, but this plan isn't that plan. It's quite different. Well, you talked a little bit about the concerns that we're hearing from parents about this plan, but I know that there's also been major concerns voiced by teachers. And you've received a lot of emails, particularly because you wrote an opinion piece in the Gazette where you spoke directly to teachers about this return to school.

What are you hearing from them about their biggest concerns right now about this reopening? They're working flat out. They're very uncertain. A lot of them feel that the emphasis is on the children's health and not on theirs. They're scared. They're not being offered a lot of choices unless they can get medical exemptions. They're finding that the classrooms are kind of crowded. They're finding that, you know, some students, students can choose to wear a mask in the class.

The government says the schools can't force, even private schools can't force students to wear a mask in the class because of communication. But I think that teachers are finding even when students are wearing masks that it's, you know, hard to understand them, hard to be understood if they're wearing a mask. I think they're concerned about, you know, their exposure because now the teachers are circulating classrooms, not the students. are circulating classrooms, not the students. The teachers are saying, well, they're traveling from class to class. And I heard from one teacher who is an English teacher in the French system saying she goes from class to class and it's very crowded. And she is being exposed to hundreds of kids. We have classrooms with not even a meter physical distancing

between students or desks. We have school buses that are going to run at full capacity. I mean the school board and the schools are are bound to what the ministry is imposing on us whether we're in agreement or not. They're also worried about the sick days like where where does that time come from? Are you going to be compensated? Are you using all your sick days for a test that turns out negative? You know, like, so there's all, teachers are very concerned that for various reasons, the children, everyone's concerned about the children's health and no one's concerned about that. How do you convince teachers that the measures you're adopting are safe and do you have a credibility issue? Well, we need to prove over the next few days, which are starting now, that our measure will work. But I think, you know, we cannot do that by ourselves. It's a teamwork. We cannot do that by ourselves. It's a teamwork.

You know, our colleagues at CBC Montreal and Radio Canada circulated a questionnaire before teachers went back to school. And we had nearly 2,000 teachers and principals and other education workers in the public schools filled it out. And as you've been mentioning, the kinds of concerns that you've been mentioning seem to be echoed in their responses that people were concerned about their personal safety and also a feeling that there was a lot of confusion about government guidelines and a real widespread dissatisfaction with how the Quebec education minister, Jean-Francois Roberge, was rolling this out and was communicating what the plan is. We are really aware for the risk for not open the school. Not open the school is putting our kid at risk.

What do you think is the source of that confusion? I think there's a lot of bitterness about how things went last spring, because it was like whiplash inducing, you know, a lot of work that they were required to do to prepare for things that never happened. Like it was it was a plan that was in constant flux. You know, they're waiting for the spent the summer waiting for, you know, the next year to drop the plan. And then the plan that came along in, I guess, August a few weeks ago, because there was one in June, but then they modified in August. There's a lot of mistrust. And I think teachers have, maybe we haven't always seen it, but they've been working flat out with a changing and evolving plan and you know they're they're

professionals so they show up and they have a smile on their face and they're they're putting aside their own um the risks to themselves and their own fears to to be there for our kids so i think they they deserve our appreciation for that but there there's a whole history of sort of changing plans that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence, I think, for teachers. It also seems that these concerns really heighten the, you know, existing underlying cracks in Quebec's school system, which I know is something that you've written about. Tell me more about that. Last week, the school boards and the unions and everyone was revealing that there's missing a thousand teachers to go back to school in the classroom, 500 of them in Montreal.

And that's not a new problem. This has happened in years before that there aren't enough educators to fill all the positions. In Montreal, the student body is growing. While schools can add more spaces, adding teachers is proving more difficult. If you're a master of the French language right now, I think you can pretty much go anywhere. They're like gold right now. I think everybody's looking for them. COVID has gone and made that worse because you have basically anyone who has a medical exemption.

A lot of people took early retirement because, you know, there's too much uncertainty. Why deal with that? They could get out. They did. So that just made an existing problem worse. That goes back to previous governments' budget cuts. It goes back to there's a whole host of factors behind it, many of them historical. But that, you know, the cracks have been widened.

And, you know, that's something schools are grappling with. Because it's still playing out and students are still going back, like we haven't heard too much how all that got done in the last few days, like down to the 11th hour of school starting. Well, a shortage of 1,000 teachers, I mean, that's an astonishing number. Yeah, that's on Quebec level, but half of them in basically Montreal. The government was already trying to resolve this with all kinds of special permission for new graduates and kind of like they did with the nurses, like with trying to recruit teachers abroad. They're already trying to deal with it, but, you know, all these things made it worse.

And the other issue, equally difficult to resolve quickly is the maintenance backlog like it's almost half I don't have the number in front of me but there's a significant number of schools in Quebec that are in a serious state of disrepair like we had one school in Montreal Sophie Barra that you know basically two weeks before a week before school started the parents found out half of the building was uninhabitable and their kids were being shipped across town. So this is another problem that's on a huge scale. It's not just one or two schools.

It's many, many schools all over Quebec. I'm going to go. angel capital organization empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. Fifty percent. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. So I know that there's three COVID-19 cases that have already been detected in Quebec schools, and at least 81 Quebec City students are now in isolation.

I think many people were anticipating that there might be outbreaks in the future. But in that event, what is the province's plan? I mean, is there a threshold when schools will have to be shut down again? That's been sort of one of the big question marks going in is what happens when there is a case? What happens when someone just has symptoms and then has to be tested? And the government promised that people would be alerted

if they're not only if there was a COVID case in their child's class, but if there is a COVID case in the school and public health authorities would obviously kind of descend on those schools and try to mitigate the fallout before it spreads too widely. You know, Legault basically said yesterday, the premier said yesterday,

well, don't make me have to cancel school. Think of the children. The next few weeks will be critical. We have to find our discipline. We don't want to close our schools. So that's already disconcerting. The other problem is I think those cases that happened weren't necessarily that they got them in the schools,

like they came back and maybe had exposures elsewhere. And I think their goal is to try to keep them from spreading within the school and causing a wider outbreak within the school. And if they do show symptoms, we have a plan in effect with all their schools. We have the isolation room and evacuation room. So right away, you know, the child would be moved and we've got a protocol in place. So ultimately, what do you think that reopening

the schools is going to mean for Quebec's ability to try and keep these cases down? Well, I think it's going to be complicated. It was always going to be a bit of a risk to everyone, and some outbreaks are always going to be inevitable. But because it's sort of circulating here, there, and everywhere now, and the cases seem to be rising, basically it was just a reminder yesterday from Legault, everybody don't let down your guard.

I think there's a reminder yesterday from Legault, everybody don't let down your guard, you know. I think there's a fear of a COVID fatigue and there's also the fear of a mixed message because it's like, okay, go. We want you to go back to school. Go back to school. It's a hard line to walk to say, go, but be careful. But be careful. I mean, for parents and teachers that you've spoken to, is the province's response too tough or is it not tough enough there that's a hard one i think it's not tough enough in the sense like they're kind of you know wishy-washy on contact tracing they held hearings on it and they were quite in depth and

interesting but then they decided no we're not going to go in that direction so there's things they could be doing that they're not doing for various reasons that the government has decided, you know, not to force all students to wear masks, not to force, not even to let private schools require all students to wear masks. it's hard. That's my best analysis of the situation because there is that contingent that doesn't want masks and there have been some protests. And, you know, they kind of, sometimes they make these decisions for the logistical reasons rather than what would be the best thing in an ideal situation. And I think everyone has to acknowledge it's not so easy either to, like, sometimes these things are easier said than done, like getting little kids to wear masks. It's tough. I wonder whether this is also a case of there not being enough creative reimagining of what a school could look like during a pandemic.

I mean, what about holding outdoor classes or finding entirely different locations, safer locations for kids to learn? No, absolutely. And that's something I think the New York Times had an article over the summer talking about what was done in tuberculosis epidemics a century ago. I think even in Canada, some of this was implemented. But basically, they held classes outdoors. They held them in buildings, sort of vacant buildings that maybe were more open air. And I think New York is actually doing some of that now, requisitioning extra space in libraries and parks for classes. And there was a movement here, a small, but yeah, no one is, the government at least,

the ministry at least, is not thinking outside the box at all. government at least, the ministry at least, is not thinking outside the box at all. Well, it'll be interesting to see as we continue to face the challenges of COVID-19, whether some of these creative solutions will start popping up. Thank you so much, Alison, for your insight into this. Oh, my pleasure. And we're kind of the canary in the coal mine here of back to school. So I hope it goes well for us. And I wish everybody a good back to school in other parts of Canada. For sure. Thank you. Some health-related news before we go today. Around 20 cases of COVID-19 are now linked to one karaoke bar in Quebec City.

Public health officials noted that although Bar Kerouac was operating at 30% capacity, created barriers between customers, and were sanitizing the mics often, those efforts might not have been enough to prevent transmission. Health officials are now looking into whether clients who frequented the bar are following public health guidelines to get tested. Quebec's health minister is asking the police to investigate and possibly administer fines to people or establishments who have broken public health rules. That's all for today. I'm Josh Bloch. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.