‘Worst plan in Canada’: Sask. NDP reacts to Saskatchewan back-to-school plan

The Saskatchewan NDP is giving the province’s back-to-school plan an F.

“(It’s) a plan that took two months for the (Minister of Education Gord Wyant) to come up with, a plan that was the last detailed plan to be delivered in all of Canada and somehow the minister has managed to come up with the worst plan in Canada,” NDP Education Critic Carla Beck told reporters on Tuesday.

“I am upset, I am angry and I won’t accept this as a plan for school’s reopening in the fall.”

The province closed schools in March due to COVID-19. In June, the government announced in-person learning would resume in the fall and it started to work on a plan for staff and students to return to the classrooms.

The government’s plan doesn’t include reduced class sizes or mandatory masks. It includes guidelines for how schools should operate and the overall plans will be up to the individual school divisions.

“This is a pattern of behaviour that we’ve seen from the minister time and time again – set the parameters, set the funding and then really offload any of the the hard decisions to school divisions and let them pick up the pieces,” Beck said.

The plan will start at Level 1, which is where schools are to operate as normally as possible. If needed, the number of restrictions in schools could increase if there’s a need for increased precautions.

Beck pointed out the plan doesn’t add any money to schools for increased cleaning staff or to help teachers deal with the new normal under COVID-19.

“I expected better than this. I didn’t expect to have all the concerns addressed but I did expect to see a plan that was markedly different from the one that we saw in June when, in fact, what we see today contains no additional details and no reassurance from the plan that we saw in June and that is deeply disappointing,” Beck said.

She said she would be in favour of seeing some sort of mandatory mask policy in place for kids aged 10 and over as well as in high schools.

Parents had questions coming into the day about how the plan would look and Beck feels like they haven’t been given any information about if students will be safe in the fall or not.

“Parents have to make decisions in their own life if their family is immunocompromised, if they have elderly relatives that might live with them (or) whether they have flexible work arrangements so that their student can stay home to work,” Beck said.

She said it’s important the back-to-school plan succeeds or it could have some major consequences.

“We are risking not only the shutdown and the health of people in those schools, we are risking reshutting down whole sectors of the economy again,” Beck said.

She said the amount of community transmission has gone up in the province but the plan doesn’t appear to take that into account.

“This seems to be a plan that is setting our schools up to fail and if and when people get sick, then we’ll look at bringing in additional measures,” Beck said. “Why don’t we do everything we can right now to set up our schools to be as safe as possible so we reduce the risk of transmission?”