HALIFAX -- Tuesday morning, schools will open their doors for the first time since March.
With teachers now back to work, the final push is on to get classrooms set up.
"It's okay to feel anxious and to be a little nervous. None of us have ever opened a school or gone to a school in a pandemic," said Doug Hadley, spokesperson for the Halifax Regional Centre for Education or HRCE.
The Nova Scotia Teachers Union (NSTU) has been critical of the province's back-to-school plan and were trying to get school delayed by two days so teachers had some additional time to prepare.
The union has been tweeting a number of photos, showing everything from stickers peeling off the floors because of humidity, to the lack of physical distance available in some classrooms.
They are even raising concerns about sanitizer in schools and how it will be dispensed.
"There's no fixtures on the walls, teachers are being told that they have to manually dispense, squeeze a squirt of sanitizer from a bottle on children's hands. So it's not like at the grocery store or a retail outlet, where you can sort of step on a lever and not have anybody else touch or be close to you," said Paul Wozney, president of the NSTU.
The Halifax Regional Centre for Education says they have delivered over 19,000 liters of sanitizer to schools in the Halifax-area, but says how it will be dispensed varies.
"There's a combination of stations, where students, as they come a door they can press the station and get it in their hand, they have individual hand sanitizer pumps in every classroom so students and staff can hand sanitize when they kind of enter and exit their classroom cohort. Some of the schools are taking the hand sanitizer out of large jugs and putting it into small jugs because it would be easier for students to use," said Hadley.
Some parents have expressed concern about an email they received, asking them to send a full bottle of water with their child to school each day.
But Hadley says it has nothing to do with water supply.
"What schools have been doing is asking parents if they want to send their child with a full water bottle to start the day, it actually limits interactions amongst cohorts in schools if they're out trying to get water refilled. It also limits gathering around water stations where they might be gathering water," said Hadley.
While the final push is on, Hadley says care takers and custodial staff have been working hard since the start of the pandemic to keep schools clean.
"They've been working throughout the summer, we tried to give them a little bit of time off at the beginning of August so they could recharge. But they've been at it full-time for the last six months and we wouldn't be where we are today without them," he said.
Although many parents want to go with their child for the first day of school, the HRCE is asking them not to this year because of the pandemic.
"Come Tuesday, it's going to be really, really important as much as possible, we know it's not always possible, but for parents to actually not come to the school because that will create crowds and what we're really trying to do is limit gatherings and limit crowds because we want to our part to limit the community spread of COVID-19," said Hadley.
