Under a large, white wedding-style tent set up in the field of St. Jerome Catholic School, a group of kindergartners are learning French.
“What is the colour of the ground?” the teacher asks the 15 kids in French immersion, struggling to make her voice heard beyond her mask and the background noise from students taking “fresh air breaks” in the nearby lot of the school near Keele Street and Sheppard Avenue West.
The students yell out colours in French. Some jump up and down while doing so. Others move around their chairs. Some just sit and take in their outdoor surroundings on a crisp fall day.
“This is a space that can be used for teaching or a place where teachers can take a fresh air break if it’s raining,” said principal Rocco DiDomizio.
“We are going to encourage teachers and classes to be outside as much as they can, at least once or twice a week,” he said, adding that each tent can hold up to two cohorts, with a divider between them.
The Toronto Catholic District School Board launched the tent pilot project for this school year, putting up large tents in fields or lots at 10 schools in areas deemed high risk for . If it goes well, the board plans to put up eight more tents at schools across the city as part of Phase 2 in the coming weeks.
The pilot, which will cost the board $100,000 for the next four months, is aimed at giving teachers and children a safe alternative to being inside a stuffy classroom given COVID-19 is not believed to be as transmissible outdoors.
Other school boards such as , Hamilton and Halton have also been experimenting with outdoor classes. And medical experts in the Sick Kids on school reopenings suggested educators “should be asked to assess and incorporate outdoor learning opportunities as weather permits.”
Around the globe, countries have experimented with the idea, with reports of classes in Denmark heading to local cemeteries where kids learn math using dates on gravestones.
In the Halton District School Board, Suzanne Burwell — the board’s environmental sustainability specialist — said while the board has for years focused on outdoor learning, this year it has made a concerted effort “to take learning outside, to provide outdoor space for students,” and that will continue throughout the winter.
“It’s not just taking the same lesson and going outside, sitting on a chair outside … it’s making it experiential education,” she said, adding that this year schools have had to get particularly creative. High schools are using bleachers or football fields as classroom spaces; some have moved stationary bikes outside for gym classes “or are accessing local trails off-site.”
“We had a school that transformed sections of the track into pickleball courts,” she said. “Kids were repurposing the same space in a different way each time.”
In many schools, there is an expectation that every student will learn outside for a portion of the day, Burwell said, whether it be gym, science or reading.
The Toronto District School Board, the country’s largest, “encourages outdoor learning as much as possible and we know schools are already coming up with creative ways of doing this. It will vary from school to school depending on what works best for that particular school or individual class,” said spokesperson Ryan Bird.
“With regard to the use of tents, while we are looking at what other boards are currently doing, we have a number of concerns including overnight security of tents and area, their limited use as the weather gets colder, limited resources when it comes to caretaking time and funds, and equity of access across the system: while some schools and/or school councils may be able to afford tents, others may not,” he said.
Across Ontario schools, some 876 COVID-19 cases have been reported among students, teachers and staff since the first day of classes.
At a Friday news conference — as the province announced stricter rules in Toronto, Peel and Ottawa — Adalsteinn Brown of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto said the lowest source of outbreaks has been schools.
But the Toronto public board’s lack of leadership on outdoor schools has been frustrating to many parents, including Jessica Greenberg, who says she reached out to the local superintendent’s office in August to get direction.
She says the office “assured me that he was supportive of outdoor learning and our efforts to create safe outdoor spaces, but that at the time he and the TDSB were not in a position to really say or do anything.”
“It was recommended that we become a model and example for other schools across the TDSB,” says Greenberg.
In response, Greenberg started the SaferOutsideTO Facebook group in early September to connect with other school communities. “From the beginning it has felt essential that all advocacy efforts be citywide so that any school community wanting to engage in outdoor learning could have equal access to resources, information and expertise,” she says of the Facebook group.
She also began working with parents and teachers to facilitate outdoor classes at the Grove Community School, an alternative school within Alexander Muir public school on Gladstone Avenue, where her two children are in grades 3 and 5.
Many of the alternative school’s classes are now taught outside.
“Our kids are outside almost all of the time because we have an extraordinary group of teachers who have been leading this, who are committed to this,” said Greenberg.
But when parents tried to put up tarps last week in preparation for rain in the forecast, they were told to take them down. Greenberg says they have also been told they can’t use donated tables.
“The city really came together and said we need to protect bars and restaurants … we’re going to take over the streets. Every weekend the Lake Shore is shut down so people can bike. Those initiatives are wonderful,” said Greenberg. “But nobody is considering doing anything like that when it comes to schools and our students. And they are the last priority.”
In a letter to parents this week, Alexander Brown, chair of the Toronto public board and a trustee in Willowdale/Ward 12, said staff are talking to their Toronto Catholic counterparts to see if they could launch a similar project.
“We have also taken steps to negotiate greater access to city parks, marked physically distant circles at elementary schools and provide opportunities for classes to spend time outside in their cohorts,” wrote Brown.
In the letter, the TDSB said it is concerned about issues of liability, safety, and equity for schools and families that don’t have the means to fundraise.
That’s why the pilot project in the Toronto Catholic board was based on serving priority areas first, said Ward 9 Trustee Norm Di Pasquale, noting that the funding came through the federal government.
“We’ve given it first to schools in the COVID hot spots,” he said. “And those are the most underprivileged places in our city, so it was kind of a no-brainer to start there.”
The board will likely assess the data to see if the project is one worth keeping: “We’re trying to see how much extra work it is for custodians, for teachers … seeing if French class works better outside; which classes work, which ones don’t,” he said.
“How does it work when the weather shifts? How does it go in the rain, a windy day, a snowy day? We’re really trying to collect everything that there is to know about the experience under the outdoor tents.”
Noor Javed is a Toronto-based reporter covering current affairs in the York region for the Star. Follow her on Twitter:
Patty Winsa is a Toronto-based data reporter for the Star. Reach her via email:
Kristin Rushowy is a Toronto-based reporter covering Ontario politics for the Star. Follow her on Twitter:
