September 8, 2020. Back to school.
During a ”normal year”, children and parents look forward to the beginning of school with a mixture of emotions, everything from anticipation to dread. This year, in some ways, those feelings will be the same, but with added stress and uncertainty.
The Provincial Government and Public Health’s main focus is ensuring the physical space is safe for people to interact. Hopefully, the government will meet their deadline of August 1st to announce a complete blueprint of the required protocols to enable school to reopen. Yet even before the announcement, schools are anticipating it will be a different learning environment for children and staff that will require everyone’s support to help the children adequately adapt and thrive.
School personnel will work hard to prepare the physical space for students and staff, following the Public Health guidelines. Stringent cleaning protocols will be implemented in addition to the social gathering and distancing guidelines. Unfortunately, it is expected there will be restrictions on play equipment and learning tools; anything that cannot be properly cleaned will need to be stored away. However, with a little planning and time, the physical spaces within the schools will be ready in the fall.
Nevertheless, in addition to the physical space protocols, other variables need to be considered and will be harder to prepare for. What are these other variables?
The emotional and social requirements of the communities need to be adequately considered. Simply put, the mental side, the social, emotional and traumatic impact, this pandemic has had on the children and adults.
The individual experiences will have been varied during the closures of schools. Feelings will range from being fine, to experiencing a repression of feelings, while others may be experiencing overt traumatization. Failure to understand and support these different reaction ranges will be a disservice to the returning students and staff.
For “while the tendency is to seek “best practice” solutions to school re-entry, reality tells us that each of our schools will require a unique response to re-entry mostly because we are planning this response while still “being in it””. (North American Centre for Threat Assessment and Trauma Response)
Thus, in order to support the students and staff, Kevin Cameron, the Executive Director of the North American Centre for Threat Assessment and Trauma Response, provided Mountain View School Division principals and students services staff with a presentation on the Guidelines for Re-Entry on June 17th.
The North American Centre for Threat Assessment and Trauma is an organization whose focus is to ”support agencies and professionals in every community to develop collaborative multidisciplinary teams focusing on early intervention, prevention, and aftermath strategies for crises, trauma, violence, and conflict”. Schools across the continent have collaborated with NACTAT to assist in intervention training to support students in the schools. Using their unique resource base and experience, Mr. Cameron and his team were able to quickly put together a framework for schools to access.
The guidelines provide a foundation for supporting staff and students with the transition back into schools. To enable staff to properly address the issues, Kevin Cameron and his team are advocating for time for staff to come together and acclimatize to the new contingencies, to debrief, and to prepare for the children to return.
During his presentation to the MVSD staff, Mr. Cameron focused on the social emotional and traumatic impact of Covid-19 on students and families. Although Manitoba may not have had as heavy an impact from the virus as compared with many other jurisdictions, Mr. Cameron cautioned that our schools and communities will be experiencing the effects of school closures. Covid-19 and the emergency measures that have resulted from the pandemic has led to significant disruptions for many families. Some children have been cut off from their primary support system, whereby others will be thriving at home. Regardless of the situation at home, he shared that the best predictor of how the kids will be when school resumes is directly correlated to how the staff are faring. School leaders are encouraged to support staff and model calmness.
The June session provided valuable training for our school leaders. As a result, Mountain View is pursuing additional training for staff, including Educational Assistants, on the Guidelines for Re-Entry to support our students, staff and families as best as we can. This would also include discussions with our community partners to determine where the needs are greatest due to the pandemic. For it is only by working together to try to support the different needs that our communities will be able to come out of this stronger and have the ability to thrive.