At the first day of class, students and their parents at John Norquay elementary were greeted by the parent advisory council with baked goods.
Inside teacher-librarian Joy Smith checked whether parents knew school would only be in session for an hour Monday, with the first full day of classes to begin across the district Tuesday.
Outside, kids shouted as they were dropped off and said goodbye to their parents.
In a school year delayed by a bitter strike, it was all about returning to normal, and for parents and many students alike, it didn’t come too soon.
Parent Trieu Duong brought his son Michael to school for the first time since classes shut down prematurely in June. He was happy to have his son at school instead of hanging out at the family’s restaurant with his mother because there was no one else to take care of him. Michael was happy his summer vacation stretched three weeks longer than scheduled because of the prolonged labour dispute between teachers and the government. The Grade 5 student feels shy about making friends at a school that’s new to him. He attended Queen Alexandra until the family moved.
Parent Lovelle Dy said her three children, who are in Grades 3 and 5, urged her to hurry while they waited outside for her in the rain because they were so keen to return to school.
“They said it’s so boring at home, saying when is school going to come back again? Complaining every day,” Dy said.
Her children swam at Killarney Community Centre, played soccer and visited the library while they waited for school to start.
Dy is relieved she’ll be able to focus on her 10-month old son during the school days ahead.
Margaret Jorgensen, who’s starting her first year as Norquay’s principal, felt relatively relaxed about the start of school,
“It was a hard way to say goodbye to a community and a hard way to enter a new community because all those normal transition things that I would normally attend, year-end events, year-end community events, I didn’t have an opportunity to,” said the former principal at Strathcona elementary. “But the staff and the parents [at Norquay] have been really, really warm and welcoming.”
Teachers were paid to work Friday, whether they readied their classrooms or not.
“The parking lot was completely full here on Friday,” said Smith.
“I’m really, really happy to be back,” added the woman who has worked in schools for more than 25 years. “The strike was brutal. It was brutal. But I’m trying to put that all behind me and just move on.”
Two-dozen Grade 1 students gathered at Pinky Kwan’s feet and spoke mainly in Mandarin Monday morning.
They were the same students she taught in kindergarten in the Early Mandarin Bilingual program last year. They all returned.
“That’s why their Mandarin is so good,” she told the Courier after class, with a laugh.
The Mandarin program is in its fourth year at Norquay and most of Kwan’s 24 Grade 1 students hail from families that speak no Mandarin at home.
The program is delivered half in Mandarin and half in English so it doesn’t serve English-as-a-second-language students well. EMB students need to be fluent in English first. The program primarily focuses on spoken Mandarin.
PAC co-chair Mary Wilson’s oldest child, Isla, is entering Grade 2 in the Mandarin program and Wilson says Isla can understand and speak in simple sentences to shopkeepers in Chinatown.
“And they all say she has a fabulous accent,” Wilson said. “It’s kind of funny because a little kid speaking Chinese, they don’t expect it at all.”
Isla also recognizes some Chinese characters.
Wilson’s daughter Ana starts kindergarten in the Mandarin program, which is open to children from across the district, this week. The family lives near Rogers Arena.
Wilson works for a large international organization, has frequent contact with people in Asia and sees the value of learning a second language.
“It’s a huge gift for a child,” said Wilson, who doesn’t speak a second language and wishes she did.
“In fact, I think we’ll all end up taking Mandarin lessons eventually… So I can hear what they’re planning in a different language right in front of me, right,” she said.
As parents clustered under umbrellas outside the school at 9:30 Monday morning, Kwan reminded her students to bring lunches Tuesday because the school’s breakfast and lunch program wouldn’t resume until Wednesday.
That’s what the public needs to remember, said Smith. Schools offer “so much more than just an education facility.
“The woman that runs the breakfast and the lunch program is like the most wonderful mother to everybody,” Smith said. “All those connections kids have with so many different people on staff, plus with each other, that all goes missing when school’s not in.”
The new playground at the back of the school, which the PAC raised money for and had installed last year, buzzed at 9:40 Monday morning as children laughed, slid and swung.
