It’s six days until students in the Toronto Catholic District School Board return to in-person learning, but it’s not clear when they’ll know who their teacher will be.
Teachers have sounded the alarm to NEWSTALK1010 that plans keep changing, and some of them aren’t even sure what grades they’ll be teaching.
Trustee Norm Di Pasquale confirms that’s true, saying a large number of parents didn’t return their pre-registration surveys.
“So that (registration deadline) has come and gone and now we’re just trying to reach parents,” Di Pasquale says. “There are some schools where we haven’t reached all the parents, there are some where we haven’t reached 25 per cent of them actually. We have to reach those parents and figure out what they plan to do.”
Because of the lack of survey responses, we don’t know what class sizes look like either. But Di Pasquale says the district is getting close to solidifying numbers.
“We are very, very close, but now we have to take those numbers and our administrative staff have to crunch them and kind of figure out ‘OK are we going to have a full Grade 4 class, are we going to have a (Grades) 3-4 split, so now it’s up to the principals to take the numbers and crunch them and figure out what all the classes will look like, and then they can inform the teachers.”