Notley reacts to government’s back-to-school plan
Posted Jul 21, 2020 5:46 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
EDMONTON (660 NEWS) – Following the Alberta government releasing details of its back-to-school plan for the fall, opposition leader Rachel Notely called out the UCP for not taking enough steps to protect students.
Notley says the NDP’s continued number one priority is to protect the health and safety of children and staff, and in doing so, agreed with the government’s decision to close schools in March.
“It was the right decision to get ahead of the pandemic and limit the potential for outbreaks in schools,” explained Notley.
At the time, Notley says the active cases in the province were limited to 57 and only 16 new cases had been announced on the day the schools closed.
Now, however, there are over 1,000 active cases, with the number continuing to climb.
Notley says this does not mean schools should not be reopened.
“This reality, however, highlights the critical need to reopen with fully-funded supports for health and safety.”
She says Premier Jason Kenney presented a false choice, implying that the only two decisions are to either reopen or not.
However, she says that’s not the case and the real decision to be made is either to open our schools or open them safely.
“Unfortunately, the premier has merely chosen to open the schools with very little regard to the issue of safety.”
She says the government’s current plan is dangerous and puts children at risk while potentially deepening the impact of the pandemic.
She adds that the safety precautions in effect to limit the spread of the virus are crucial and that maintaining those precautions in school isn’t going to be cheap.
However, she says the UCP government is unprepared to spend the necessary money to protect students.
“There’s less money going into the education budget now then there was in the 2018 NDP education budget.”
She says asking the school boards to impose a new set of safety obligations on an already-stressed system without proper funding is impossible.
She adds that reserve funding cannot be enough to support all the school boards.
“The UCP tries to say the reserve funding is ‘rainy day’ money. The problem is, the minute Jason Kenney and the UCP got elected, it started raining.”
Notley says she’s also worried about class sizes and the government not discussing caps on the number of students.
She says that the boards Kenney used as examples of returning to class safely all had forms of class caps or ways of maintaining social distancing.
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The NDP will release their back-to-school plan later this week.
“Our view is that the government must immediately act to adopt a class size limit of 15 children,” said Notley.
She says not doing so is thoughtless and negligent.
