A BC parent has started a petition requesting that a return to school in September be voluntary.
As of right now, returning to school is mandatory in BC.
Edmond Luk has a number of issues with the plan including the size of learning groups. “So many contradictions to what the suggested public safety protocols were. For example the social distancing aspect, the wearing your mask in public locations especially indoors, as well as the maximum limit of people in a gathering to be 50 people or less. So this plan is in contradiction to all these points.”
“Which obviously makes us feel that the environment is not safe for anybody to be in if you’re going to have a cohort of between 60 to 120 people in an enclosed indoor area and to not have any masks or physical barriers to protect any individual.”
He says parents should not be forced to send their kids back into the classroom if they don’t feel comfortable.”The fact that they mention that this plan to go back to school in September will be mandatory for all students means that if right now, if you feel that this is not a good enough plan, you will have to withdraw your child form the school to home school. But when you do that, when you do the withdrawal, essentially you’re giving up that spot from that school placement.”
“We just ask why can’t they have this return to school as voluntary, optional. Perhaps even have a hybrid program, hybrid system like between the months of March to June so that people that want or need to have their kids enrolled in person in class can do that whereas people or families that feel their kids would be safer at home then they can learn virtually online through this simultaneous hybrid system.”
“And obviously this system went live during the months of March to June. So we’re not asking you to reinvent the wheel here. We’re telling you that there was a system that was implemented that worked for many family households and they want this back instead a full capacity in person return in September.”
Luk launched the petition over the weekend with a goal of collecting 25,000 signatures. About 24,000 have signed on as of this writing.
