At the end of the month, public elementary students might get report cards without any comments – or even without any grades.
In a memo sent to all public school boards Tuesday, Education Minister Liz Sandals said that boards should “do everything they can” to come up with some sort of “final communication” to send to parents.
“These communications may vary from board-to-board, school-to-school and even from grade-to-grade within a given school, depending on local capacity and priorities,” she wrote.
“While my hope is that there will be capacity to produce a report card with … grades but not comments, I understand that there may only be capacity to produce a letter of promotion.”
At the Waterloo Region District School Board, officials are still trying to figure out what sort of data they’ll be able to pass on to parents of the 40,000 local public elementary students.
“There may be some information from the final term. There may be no information from the final term. That’s what we’re trying to sort out right now,” executive officer Marty Deacon said in an interview.
At the least, WRDSB administrators expect to be able to provide a letter listing which grade a student will be placed in for next fall.
Although job action by the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario means teachers won’t be filling out report cards, it doesn’t mean they haven’t been evaluating students.
Greg Weiler, the president of ETFO’s Waterloo chapter, says teachers have been recording information on their pupils’ progress – just not putting it into the board’s computerized system.
He also says school boards have known about the impending report card issue since April, and could have come up with a plan already.
“We don’t understand why they have done nothing for over a month,” he said.
“What we are seeing now is largely an attempt … to pin the blame on the teachers.”
Parents who want further details on the progress of their children should contact teachers directly, Sandals said.
