To All Elementary Virtual School Families,

We are connecting once again to provide an update about the start of TDSB Elementary Virtual School. We are excited for all students to begin on Tuesday, September 22 and we know that families are looking forward to the school year getting underway as well.

As many of you know, there has been an overwhelming demand for virtual learning and more than 60,000 students are now enrolled in the Elementary Virtual School. While it was our plan to have all students start the year with synchronous (live, interactive) learning on the first day, we have determined that this will not be possible for some students due to ongoing efforts to hire staff for virtual classrooms. However, in order to ensure that all students can still begin learning on Tuesday morning, we will be implementing a rolling start.

We know that this will be a disappointment for some and is not how we had hoped to begin the school year. Please let me assure you that efforts to hire more teachers have been ongoing and staff have been working around the clock and through the weekend to keep things moving forward. You will be notified as soon as your child’s class has been assigned a teacher.

Beginning Tuesday morning, families should login to Brightspace (My Courses Widget --> Click on Course Name) to see if there is a welcome message from their child’s teacher. For those classes with a teacher assigned, synchronous learning will be underway on Tuesday. For those families who login to Brightspace and do not see a welcome message from a teacher, there is not currently a teacher assigned to the class and your child will begin on Tuesday morning with asynchronous (independent) learning.

TDSB IT Services is performing some maintenance on student accounts to prepare for tomorrow. This maintenance has taken longer than anticipated but is expected to be completed by 8 p.m. this evening. A separate message will be sent to all affected parents at that time confirming the account ID and passwords.

Please visit the TDSB Elementary Virtual School website on Tuesday morning to access a new section called ‘Asynchronous Learning Activities’ where activities connected to the Ontario curriculum will be listed by grade level for students to complete at their own pace. Additionally, you will find information about live sessions planned for students to participate in this week to help get them oriented to this new mode of learning.

We recognize that parents may have still have questions and that is why we’ve set up virtualschool@tdsb.on.ca where parents can submit questions and our staff will do their very best to respond as quickly as possible.

We are committed to meeting the needs of all students and once again ask for your patience and understanding as we continue with the incredibly challenging and complex work of establishing an Elementary Virtual School to serve more than 60,000 students.

Thank you.