4 questions Saskatchewan's Opposition has about the province's back-to-school plan

The Saskatchewan NDP says the provincial government's latest update on its back-to-school plan only managed to sow further confusion among parents and teachers. 

On Tuesday, Education Minister Gord Wyant clarified that the province's 27 individual school boards will decide whether and when to mandate masks in their schools.

Carla Beck, the Opposition's education critic, spoke Wednesday of the uncertainties she said remain. 

"I'm very frustrated with the fact that we're having any of these discussions two weeks before teachers go back into class and we can't address it," she said.

Here are four questions she said are left unanswered:

How will the elementary cohorts work?

On Tuesday, the province announced its chief medical health officer, Dr. Saqib Shahab, had called on schools to divide elementary students into smaller groups while in the classroom.

Beck criticized that plan for not including caps on those cohort sizes. 

"We don't think that it is responsible or fair that the minister keeps downloading the responsibility for these decisions onto school boards without clarity," she said.

What about extra staffing to deal with the higher number of student groups?

If students are separated into more groups, they will likely require more staff to supervise them, but the province's plan didn't account for that, Beck says. 

"[That's] something that the boards simply will not be able to do within their current budgets — budgets that were, before the pandemic, not meeting just basic growth and inflation," Beck said. 

Why the alleged contradiction in messaging?

The provincial back-to-school plan initially stated that a mandatory mask status "may be activated regionally or provincially based on the advice of our chief medical health officer" and said mask usage "would be determined by the chief medical health officer."

On Tuesday, Wyant said the decision to go to mask mode would rest with each school board, based on consultations with the chief medical health officer.

"We heard [last week] from the minister that the chief medical health officer would make the decision about when to move to Phase 1 or Phase 2," Beck said.

"Then yesterday he seemed to go back on that and leave it up to school divisions. They really have been undermined at every turn by the minister."

Why leave the decision to school boards?

While Beck conceded that individual school boards know best about their unique operating conditions, she said leaving the decision about masking to divisions potentially puts them in the crosshairs of critics. 

"Those complaints are going to go to the trustees. I'm not sure the minister understands that," Beck said. "I don't think that that is fair at this point. That's not what we've seen other other provinces do."