The Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) announced and then abruptly canceled its plan to remove trash cans from classrooms.

Jeff Pelich, president of the Waterloo Region chapter of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, said a memo outlining the plan was sent to schools last week and it had immediately started to hear from the members.

“At first we thought we were punks,” Pelich said.

The council note states the intention is to reduce the number of garbage bags used, and this initiative would achieve this by 80 percent. Pelich said teachers should have been consulted first.

“So students should leave the room and go get this centralized waste somewhere. And for us, that poses a little bit of a challenge because it’s supervision and it’s also a waste of learning time,” Pelich said.

He added that the lack of trash cans in classrooms could also be a health problem.

“What concerns us most is that waste is definitely being used for things like Kleenex, paper towels, potentially dangerous items that need to go somewhere and leaving them on the desk or on the floor doesn’t is not an appropriate place,” Pelich said. “So we want to make sure there’s a place in the room where they can be disposed of safely.”

The memo did not indicate how centralized trash cans would work for portable classrooms.

Pelich said Monday the board sent another memo, putting the plan on hold and promising further consultations before moving forward.

Pelich hopes decisions on how to reduce waste in schools can be made on a school-by-school basis.

“I hope they talk to the schools,” he said. “I think the dream scenario is where they challenge the school saying: we’d like to reduce waste by 50 percent and put that into the school and maybe a little bit of time and money to say: ‘how can we do this work?’

CTV News requested an interview with WRDSB. As of 4 p.m. Tuesday, the board had not provided an interview or statement.