With only days left before school’s out for summer, some Ontario school boards have done a 180 on whether students will be receiving report cards and what will be included in them.

Some boards – including those in Toronto, York region and the Guelph area – that previously said students would not be getting their final marks this year because of work-to-rule action by elementary teachers have now changed their tunes.

“We changed our options around,” Maggie McFadzen, communications officer for Upper Grand District School Board, which includes students from Guelph and Dufferin and Wellington counties, told QP Briefing. “We’ve realized how important it is for those kids who are transitioning to a new school to have their marks, and we figured if we could do it for them, we could make it work for all.”

Initially, some large school boards, such as those in Toronto, Peel and York region, said they would only be sending out placement letters letting parents know whether their kids had advanced to the next grade.

All three of those boards switched their plans so that marks will be available to parents, although not by the end of the school year.

A spokesman for the York Region District School Board said the board, which has 84,000 students elementary students, has been working on a contingency plan after learning from a bulletin from the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario that teachers wouldn’t be communicating with parents about students’ marks.

“That changed the landscape … as to what parents would be expecting,” Licinio Miguelo told QP Briefing. “We know that those marks are important to parents.”

York Region students’ marks are expected to be submitted by the end of today, and summaries for each student in Grades 1 through 8 will be available for parents to pick up at schools as of Aug. 31 after being input by non-unionized board staff throughout the summer. Kindergarten students will still receive placement letters as they don’t typically receive marks.

“We made a decision here at the York Region District School Board though not to incur any additional costs to process those marks that are being submitted by teachers,” Miguelo said.

The Toronto District School Board says students in Grades 1 through 8 will be sent a summary of their marks through the mail the week of July 13. In Peel, families who request marks will get them by the end of September.

Under the direction of their union, elementary teachers across the province are not inputting marks into the spreadsheets normally used to generate report cards; nor are they providing written comments.

While marks are still being submitted, schools have to generate report cards manually, which can be a time-consuming and costly task the province has said it won’t help fund.

Size seems to matter, with many smaller school boards, such as Rainbow in the Sudbury area, Lakehead District in Thunder Bay and Hastings and Prince Edward District in Belleville, telling QP Briefing that students’ marks are expected to be sent home by the end of June.

But even for the less robust boards, it’s been a bit of a learning curve, Rainbow District School Board’s director of education Norm Blaseg said Wednesday.

He told QP Briefing the board considered a lot of options for how to handle report cards this year – looking to what other areas of the province were doing and what other areas of the country had done in the past – but decided to make sending out marks a priority because of their obligation to parents.

“I think every parent deserves their report card, it’s something that speaks to their child,” he said.

Because of this, the board has had principals and vice-principals inputting marks, with non-unionized staff being trained and sent to larger schools to help administrators with the task.

“We’re doing this because we think it’s right for parents and for kids, but it is a special circumstance,” Blaseg said.

Some school boards across the province are sticking to their guns on sending home placement letters instead of marks. According to reports, students in Waterloo and London will only learn whether they have passed or failed.

Many Ontario students to receive final marks after all

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