[UPDATE] I am closing this petition and going to provide a request to the school board for more covered areas rather than bring back umbrellas. This will be safer and also meet the existing risk management decision. Thanks all for your support!

LWSD Risk Management identified the use of umbrellas at recess poses a risk of severe injury. Rather than remove the option to use umbrellas for all students, our recommendation is for LWSD recess supervising staff to monitor and implement a warning and consequence system for those students that use umbrellas in a dangerous manner. While umbrellas could be a specific object of injury, any dangerous behavior from students using other items such as jackets, backpacks, natural tree branches, rocks, etc. could be used as well so rather than focus on umbrellas specifically, we recommend on improving the focus of monitoring children during recess for all areas of safety and hazards.

Without umbrellas, we believe many students will use the covered areas to protect themselves from the rain, creating crowding in those areas and limiting physical activity options during recess. While students could still use all areas of the recess playgrounds in the rain with or without protective rain gear as an alternative, this will leave children coming back to classrooms wet and muddy (on the protective layer or not). In addition, many students do not wear rain boots on P.E. days as it limits their ability to do P.E. effectively so footwear protection is limited.

In addition, the LWSD Risk Management announcement is not clear on whether this rule applies just to students, or to staff as well. Will recess supervising staff be using umbrellas? While they are adults who can use it effectively, it is sending a message to our children that we do not trust all children, and the privilege is for adults only, rather than imposing the message (with consequences) on individual children that do not follow the rules.