The Ministère de l’Éducation is ready to call on volunteer parents for reinforcement in class and in school daycare services in the event of mass absences of staff members due to the outbreak of cases of the Omicron variant.
“Given the current context of a pandemic, the great contagion of the Omicron variant and the new instructions concerning isolation, the Ministry and the school network anticipate that a very large number of employees, all job categories combined, will have to isolate for a few days in the next few weeks. These situations could potentially lead to service disruptions in certain settings or compromise the maintenance of daycare services as they are,” indicate the guidelines sent to the school network on Wednesday.
“The basic premise is to avoid that due to a lack of staff, students are forced to be isolated at home,” adds the document.
The Ministry of Education is urging schools and service centers to take a series of extraordinary measures to keep children in school. A teacher could deal with two groups. Non-teaching staff could lend a hand. Distance learning is also part of the solutions.
External organizations such as Alloprof or volunteer parents would also be called to the rescue if necessary, in classes or in school daycare services.
In all cases, compulsory subjects must be kept on the timetable. Quebec invites communities to identify “complementary services […] that can be temporarily suspended to allow these resources to be allocated to teaching or support for a group of students (e.g. services of pedagogical advisers, orthopedagogy, speech therapy, pedagogical support)”.
Releases of a portion of the teaching task (e.g. resource teacher, mentoring, school projects or program coordination) are also possible in order to carry out a possible “shedding”, specifies the document.
More details will follow