Yesterday I got an email that The Provincial Health and Safety Taskforce is asking 2 members of our school health and safety committee to do a 30-60 minute survey. Note, this isn’t something my district is adding to our plate, it’s a provincial requirement. Just like the new mock first aid drill that was added this year.

I know health and safety are important. I know we need to care for the wellbeing of our workers and our community. I just wonder how many more of these tasks are going to be added year after year… with nothing being taken away from what we do to run a school.

Two people in every one of our province’s 1,571 public schools will now need to do a survey that will average about 45 minutes to complete. That translates to almost 100 days of work (2,356.5 hours/24 hours in a day). That’s just collecting the data, then people at the provincial level, who probably spent hundreds of ours developing the survey, now have to make sense of the data.

I’m not saying this isn’t important data, but I do question the value of having every school take the time to do this? I question how many more tasks that are not related to teaching students and leading the learning in a school are going to keep being added to our plates?

It’s death by a thousand paper cuts… despite the fact tha the paper has become digital.