Parents that live in highrises in the city’s Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood are expressing concerns about getting their children to school on time given new policies introduced to ensure physical distancing in the elevators that serve their buildings.
A story published in the Toronto Star on Tuesday detailed the experiences of several parents, who said that they often wait upwards of 20 minutes for an elevator in the morning and are concerned that the resumption of classes next month will exasperate that problem.
One parent even said that they have to go up several floors in order to be able to get on an elevator before it fills up.
Rachel Chernos Lin, who is the Toronto District School Board Trustee for the neighbourhood, told CP24 that the issue of crowded elevators in Thorncliffe Park buildings has been on the board’s radar “for quite some time” but there is unfortunately no easy solution.
She said that the board has discussed staggered start times for different grades but has run into concerns about the impact that could have on parents with multiple children.
“Everybody is putting their heads together and trying to think of what are the creative solutions to mitigate the challenges faced by this community because it is a community that does live in highrise buildings and the idea that everybody has to get down the elevators, out of the building and into the school at a certain time of day is certainly a logistical challenge at any time and this year with physical distancing and COVID even more so,” she said.
Lin said that the long wait for elevators in some Thorncliffe Park highrises has always posed problems for the parents of school-aged children, though she said that it could be more problematic this year as many of those buildings have implemented new policies that limit the number of people in any one elevator.
Lin said that while there is an “an expectation” that schools will show some flexibility when it comes to tardiness as classes resume, board staff are also looking at more formal solutions, such as extending the TDSB’s rainy day policy wherein the doors to schools are left open for a longer period of time to accommodate late-arriving children.
“It really is about everybody working together and thinking about being patient and making sure that we are trying to physically distance as much as possible and find creative solutions to a somewhat unusual problem,” she said.
