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Letter: Province needs better plan for schools

Dear editor,
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Dear editor,

At the present, we are seeing a second wave of COVID-19 developing in Ponoka. We are allowed to gather outside with 100 people, inside with 50 people, but the UCP is allowing schools to fully re-open for our kids in September. Health professionals expressed concerns in public TV that kids over the age of 10 are affected from COVID-19 in the same way as adults. How does our provincial government see social distancing being practiced in school settings, when the funds provided for PPE, extra cleaning staff, extra teacher and extra class rooms is not enough?

We as parents handled the situation with our kids since March 2020 with online learning. We didn’t get asked, but at the time it seemed to me lives of kids and adults mattered, lives of everyone mattered. But now I see a different path developing: money matters before lives. So, what has changed? Nothing. The situation is still the same as it was in March 2020.

Which brings me to a question bugging me since March: Does a government really have the right to shut down a country and private business? Should there have been instead social distancing and mandatory face masks from the beginning of this pandemic?

This brings me to a prediction. If we thought 2020 was the worst year we all experienced in our lives, just wait for 2021. Before it gets better it will get a whole lot worse, and we are not there yet.

I am, Edwin Geuder a very concerned Canadian citizen living in Ponoka, asking kindly the UCP government and all school boards for all of our health and safety to please also allow parents to decide to let their kids go to school or to rather continue online learning, and please kindly come up with a better sustainable plan as proposed.

Edwin Geuder,

Ponoka



Emily Jaycox

About the Author: Emily Jaycox

I’m Emily Jaycox, the editor of Ponoka News and the Bashaw Star. I’ve lived in Ponoka since 2015 and have over seven years of experience working as a journalist in central Alberta communities.
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