November 30, 2020

2020: Anything but normal

Here we are, in the last few weeks of 2020. It’s been a year unlike any other.

January started off with such promise. It was the start of a new decade, and our PSBAA had wrapped up its 30th anniversary celebration year. We heard about a new coronavirus half a world away, but we were focused on balancing our budgets even as class sizes increased, watching the provincial curriculum redevelopment, and waiting for the pending introduction of the Choice in Education Act in the Alberta Legislature.

Then, on Sunday, March 15, the world stopped. The coronavirus was here in Alberta and the dire headline on CBC News’ website read: “There are now 56 cases of COVID-19 in Alberta, all K-12 classes are cancelled.”

Almost overnight, teachers and educators scrambled to revise lesson plans to a virtual learning environment. Students were suddenly cut off from their friends and extracurricular activities. Graduation classes and in-person events were cancelled. “Physical distancing” suddenly described the way we lived, and inexplicably toilet paper became a hot commodity.

But our school communities rose to the occasion, moving to virtual learning with platforms like Google Classroom, Skype, and FaceTime. Zoom call etiquette quickly became a necessary social skill. We all learned, adapted and grew in ways we never would have imagined just a year ago.

Looking back, I’ve never been more proud of our leaders, teachers, support staff, students and families – everyone in our school communities who rallied to create as much normalcy as possible in a year that was anything but normal.

When we welcomed our students back to school in September, we were excited to see each other again. But that excitement was tempered with a legitimate concern for keeping our students safe. Given that class sizes that were still too large, how could we maintain physical distancing in the classroom – and on the bus?

Again, our amazing school communities rose to the occasion. Small outbreaks have been swiftly contained. And even though grade 7-12 students are off school now until after the new year – because we now have 14,217 active COVID-19 cases in Alberta as of November 27 – we know our teachers and students will make the best of it.

In the midst of such unprecedented times, though, there was still work to be done. We commissioned a research paper on the charter school experiment in Alberta 25 years later – Privatizing Public Choice: the past, present and future of charter schools in Alberta, by Ph.D. candidate Curtis Riep. We recommended that Alberta’s Auditor General look into whether charter schools are effective, given that they are funded by taxpayer dollars. Have they provided the value originally promised?

We are watching an important legal case in Saskatchewan with implications for the provincial funding of Alberta public schools, as our constitutional foundations are the same. In March, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal ruled against the Good Spirit School Division in the Theodore case. Good Spirit has submitted an application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada (SCOC). We are now waiting for the SCOC to announce whether it will hear the case. PSBAA seeks clarity on constitutional provisions as they relate to provincial funding, but we continue to respect all constitutional rights.

We are committed to trying to find ways to work collaboratively with our separate school colleagues. We would like to do that without fracturing our communities and further splintering limited resources and duplicating services.

In that line, we advocated for and supported members and non-member public school boards alike in the pursuit of protecting and promoting public education and public schools in their communities.

We collaborated with all of our member public school boards – and six of our non-member boards – on a transportation task force submission to the Alberta government. We were very pleased with this level of collaboration and the strong, united voice of public school boards on this important issue.

At our fall Annual General Meeting, our membership voted to change our bylaws to welcome Indigenous Education Authorities to join the Association if they agree with the values of public education, are committed to inclusion, certify their teachers through the Alberta Teachers’ Association and teach the Alberta curriculum.

PSBAA has also been advocating strongly to keep the name “public” in our school jurisdictions. We saw removal of the word “public” from the legal names of our school divisions, although some boards have successfully applied to the government to have the word “public” added to their corporate name and for branding purposes, but not yet for their legal name. Our name never used to be questioned; now, it is indiscriminately used to describe all provincially-funded schools and school jurisdictions in the province. The “public” schools name is as distinct and important as the “Catholic” or “Francophone” schools name, as well as private and charter schools. We are working hard to share with everyone in the education community, MLAs and community members why our name is so important to us. The word “public” is more than a word or a title – it speaks to the heart of who we are as a public school system. My November 17 blog post has more on this subject.

There are some important life lessons to be learned from the past year. In my March 23 blog post, I wrote about the importance of community during uncertain times. Even more important than our students’ formal education are the life lessons they learn in times like these: lessons like optimism, resiliency, adaptability, perseverance and community-building.

As public school board trustees, educators and leaders in our school system, we can model positive, resilient attitudes – being open to change and embracing opportunity, even in the midst of uncertainty.

These are the attitudes we can also take into 2021. I wish all of you health, safety, peace and joy during the holiday season, and a restful break!