Published Thursday, October 22, 2020 10:34AM EDT
Last Updated Thursday, October 22, 2020 10:55AM EDT
The TDSB had planned to provide three windows throughout the academic year for students to switch between virtual and in-person learning and vice versa but in a letter sent to secondary school administrators on Tuesday the board said that it now believes that the continued expansion of its virtual school is an “untenable proposition.”
The board says that as a result it has decided to not allow any more students to switch to its virtual school for Quadmester 2 and will instead leave it to principals to choose a virtual learning model that can be delivered at the school level.
“Right now we have about 18,000 secondary students in our TDSB virtual secondary school and the issue is that if we were going to have, let’s say 1,000 or 2,000 more students added to that, we would have to start pulling teachers out of high schools and if we were to do that all the courses that those teachers taught at brick-and-mortar schools would go with them,” board spokesperson Ryan Bird told CP24 on Thursday morning. “By making this change we can ensure some stability and make sure those course offering are still there, both virtually and at bricks and mortar (schools).”
In the letter obtained by CP24, the TDSB’s Associate Director of School Operations and Service Excellence Manon Gardner said that if more students were to be admitted into the virtual school staff would have to be reassigned and some traditional brick-and-mortar schools would have to “collapse courses and/or sections.”
He also said that the online platform used by the TDSB was not developed to “support such a large number of students at one school” and that a further expansion may result in “significant issues with timetabling and other processes.”
More to come…