Reflection #3

During our last class on Friday, October 3rd the topic of the COVID 19 pandemic in the SD61 school district was brought up. In 2021, after the province had been sent under quarantine for months, kids were finally being allowed to go back to school. They were however given two choices, you could return to your SD61 school under mask mandates etc. or you could chose to switch school districts to continue in online school like they had been doing in quarantine. This sparked some controversy for a variety of reasons. For one each student is allotted a certain amount of funding and by students changing districts money is taken away from one district and given to another. This made me think of a conversation I listened in on during my Link 2 Practice school last week. During the lunch hour the staff had a small meeting regarding multiple subjects but the one that stood out to me was concerning technology being distributed equally among the school. I am in Lansdowne Middle School, in the South Campus where it’s only grade 6’s, in comparison to the North Campus where they have grades 7 & 8. The issues was that the North Campus didn’t have enough chrome books for the amount of students so South Campus had to give some up. Between partner schools like this it’s a fairly easy fix, but after our conversation about the COVID 19 choice to switch schools, that made me wonder if when students switch districts how did technology get distributed equally? Another point made in the COVID 19 discussion where this district switch wasn’t a good option was that if a child/their family chose for them to switch districts and go online alienated them from their peers in a time where everyone was already struggling for connection. I couldn’t imagine all my friends going back to school together but then I had to switch and meet all new people. It’s hard to judge this choice from the schools because it was a situation no one really knew how to properly deal with. COVID threw everyone, especially the school community, teachers and students, off their state of normalcy and mistakes were made, but reflections on outcomes like this make sure this isn’t repeated again.