School districts in New Brunswick are preparing buses and schools for the full-time return of high schoolers on April 12.
Zoë Watson, superintendent of the Anglophone South School District (ASD-South), said work is being done to look at space on buses and in classrooms.
Students will need to wear masks on the bus and there will be two students per seat. Buses will also have seating plans for ease of contact tracing.
“We need that of course in case there is an outbreak or a case of a student who has the virus then we have to take into account what bus they travelled on, and who was sitting around them,” Watson said.
Watson said some buses will have mixed loads with elementary, middle and high school students, which will happen more often in rural areas.
In the classroom, high school teachers will also have seating plans in place, she said, and masks will be required all day except when eating or in the gym. Staff are looking at extra spaces in order to keep the appropriate distancing.
“We’re excited to have them back and I know students are glad to get back but we still have to keep up with all of our cleaning and all of our sanitizing and encouraging students to keep distance, but we know that when we have 800 or 900 students in a school, keeping that usual one-to-two-metre distancing is not going to be possible so hence the masking,” she said.
Before this school year even began, Watson said district staff were busy preparing for what the busing system would look like.
According to the district, 40 new casual drivers were hired with some becoming full-time employees, two drivers quit, and none were fired or laid off.
“We would say that things have gone well from our point of view. Our drivers have been great, they’ve been working very hard to ensure the safety of the students,” she said.
With COVID-19 protocols limiting the number of students on buses, families were asked if they could reduce the workload on transportation by picking up or dropping off their children. Some agreed, either transporting in the morning or the afternoon.
Watson said some families discovered they couldn’t transport their kids once school started due to work commitments as well as the length of time spent clearing the drop-off areas.
An additional 12 buses were added to the 240 already on the road in ASD-South to accommodate the new protocols.
Casual bus drivers who normally fill in when someone is sick were moved into the new positions, which meant the district needed to find more casual drivers. To date, the district has trained 25 new casuals to add to their list.
Training includes a one-week class course, a medical component, and spending time observing on school buses. There’s more time spent working with a driver coach and passing the road test.
Bus drivers must complete enhanced cleaning protocols at the end of the day, and on top of wearing a mask, must have a transparent curtain drawn as students are picked up to reduce any possible exposure.
Watson said one positive out of the enhanced cleaning and mask use is how few people have colds or the flu in schools because anyone sick has had to stay home, reducing transmission to others.
“We’ve noticed it in the office, too. We usually will have had a cold by now, but not this time,” she said.
