Adieu, Monsieur
As schools scramble to adjust to learning in a pandemic, an unlikely casualty emerges: the French teacher.
The Herculean Task
Though the back-to-school ads have yet to appear, educators are already bracing to return to the classroom. Schools are facing unprecedented logistical hurdles.
In many major North American cities, the Covid-19 pandemic remains a real threat. The thought of hundreds of young people sharing desks and rotating through narrow hallways and poorly-ventilated classrooms is proving to be one of the greatest tests to face public education systems in living memory.
With many governments pressuring school boards to re-open, often without a clear road map for how to do so safely, stakeholders in education are coming to terms with what school will look like come autumn.
And there is plenty to consider. Most schools were built for close human contact in confined spaces. Narrow hallways, clustered lockers, shared desks, and classrooms with hard-to-open windows, make these old buildings breeding grounds for the transmission of viruses. Social distancing in a school? Virtually impossible.
But the biggest hurdle may not be physical, but financial.
