Education Minister Dominic Cardy. (GNB YouTube)
New Brunswick’s Education Minister is hopeful for full time classes in the upcoming school year.
Dominic Cardy says this can happen if we continue to see vaccines roll out and more COVID-19 successes around the world, “Certainly hopeful that we will have a much more normal school year next year and we can start treating COVID the same way as we treat measles and mumps and other dangerous diseases that we get vaccinated against. It will hopefully become more of a background to our lives and not something that irritates us day to day.”
Cardy says some of the smaller high schools have already returned to full time learning this year, and have been able to sustain it because of a lower number of students.
“It has been a disruptive year, but it has been predictable and structured, which is important for students and for institutions. /We did the best that we could with the information that we had, and I am looking for to being able to remove those restrictions and being able to go back to a normal life again. Not having masks and letting young people be young people.”
But he admits, the consequences and the mental health affects on some students has been severe, “The only thing I was trying to remind myself is recognizing that the one day on, one day off system is not great, it beats the alternative, which was having our schools be the focal point for outbreaks or deaths or the sort of disruption that we’ve seen in other provinces and States.”
Cardy says one of the few positives of COVID-19, is recognizing that we can build in technological supports to allow a whole world of online learning that will become much more available to our students.
“If you are in a small school that doesn’t have access to French language instruction, now you can have a teacher, perhaps who isn’t fully fluent themselves, but they can access online courses and other good online materials. You’ll have high school students have more flexibility with optional courses at the higher levels, If you don’t have access to a course that you might find of particular interest. Now with online learning there will be opportunities for students to take advantage of materials and lectures from not just the best minds in their schools, but from around the province, the country and even around the world,” Cardy says.
