As a school principal in an underprivileged environment for more than six years, I was confronted with many problems that took me outside the educational framework in which I had been invited to get involved: poverty, family violence, dropping out of school. , psychological distress… but I did not experience the pandemic at school which has added to the social reality of my colleagues in recent years.
As vice-president of the Montreal Association of School Directions (AMDES), I also had to support several colleagues struggling with organizational and social difficulties for which they had not been trained.
For 18 months, school principals have been keeping the survival of children’s education and support for teachers at arm’s length.
Over the past few months, they have had to manage the opening and closing of classes, if not their environment, the accompaniment of teachers unfamiliar with internet communications and even less with distance education.
But hey, it was part of the school’s role to ensure the pedagogical continuum, to ensure that each child receives the education that is due to him, that each teacher is able to support him, to be quickly trained in this new technology in order not to lose a child, to ensure his academic progress, but also his emotional balance.
A school principal is the great tenor, the one who must ensure that the educational task is well accomplished, that his team of teachers receives all the necessary support. This great helmsman must support his teachers and all his staff in what is most beautiful, namely to equip his world so that each child receives what he is in school for, that is to say to learn ( educate, socialize and qualify). The purpose of the school …
An expanded role
Over the past 18 months, the role of the school and of the school administration has expanded. They lent a helping hand to Public Health: closing classes, rapid detection tests in certain settings, calls to parents, newsletters, tracing cases of COVID-19. It was a necessary evil, it was necessary to keep schools open, to facilitate learning, to allow children to live a normal life with school reality, to learn. Support the anxiety of staff, parents, children. Reassure, provide the necessary protective equipment, convince worried parents of the need for school attendance… Challenge met! Well done !
But what is coming worries me greatly. Because as if it went without saying, we decided to broaden the contribution of the school under the pretext that all the children are gathered in the same environment.
School principals do not have to carry this new social weight. Manage letters to parents, run vaccination authorizations, answer the many questions and anxieties or anger of parents, run up against recalcitrant and opponents, have to manage disputes, charter school buses to transport students for vaccination, compose with reduced classes for those whose parents refuse the vaccination and those who will have to take the bus, organize the surveillance of all these little people, accept or not the parents in the school or on the school bus … and I forget.
Managers do not have to manage debates about the pros and cons of immunization and become the strong advocates of any position. It is not their role and it does not fall within their area of expertise.
And in all this process, what is the support and accompaniment to the educational task? Learning? Apart from the fact that it is a physical place where we find all the children together? Isn’t it better for parents to make an appointment with their child at a vaccination center and accompany them through the whole process rather than assigning the school a role of vaccination manager?
What do you think? Express your opinion