In-person learning will resume at schools in most of Ontario next week but students in Toronto, Peel and York regions will have to wait until Feb. 16 for their return to the classroom.
The Ford government has announced that schools will reopen in an additional 13 public health units as of Monday, including Durham and Halton regions.
But it says that schools will remain remote-only in Toronto, Peel and York for another week and will instead reopen after the Family Day long weekend on Feb. 16.
“We are going to get this right, we are going to safely reopen our schools, we are going to protect our students and staff and with your continued support and vigilance we are going to keep community transmission low and as a result we are going to keep our schools open,” Education Minister Stephen Lecce said in making the announcement at Queen’s Park on Wednesday afternoon.
Schools were closed following the holiday break as part of a provincewide lockdown that went into effect on Boxing Day.
Elementary students in southern Ontario were initially supposed to return to the classroom on Jan. 11 with secondary students following two weeks later but the Ford government opted to keep most schools shuttered as COVID-19 case counts surged immediately following the holidays.
Since then community transmission of the novel coronavirus appears to have slowed, with the rolling seven-day average of new infections dropping from 2,850 on Jan. 20 to about 1,800 as of today.
Against this backdrop students in northern Ontario were given the green light to return to in-person instruction on Jan. 11 and schools in 11 other public health units in southern regions of the province have since been permitted to reopen as well.
“I want to be clear if things change, if trends move in the wrong direction we will not hesitate to act following the advice of the Chief Medical Officer of Health,” Lecce said on Wednesday, noting that local medical officers of health will still have the authority to order the closure of schools in their communities. “That is why we are going to monitor the trends and continue to be in close contact with the local medical officers of health to ensure we deliver on the number one priority of our government, which is keeping schools safe.”
Ford government promises additional safeguards
During the fall term there were confirmed COVID-19 cases that occurred at nearly half of all schools but officials repeatedly contended that the positive cases were largely the product of transmission within the community and not the schools themselves.
Lecce said that as part of reopening schools the province is adding “additional layers of protection,” most notably the introduction of targeted asymptomatic testing for students and staff and new mandatory masking requirement for students in Grades 1 to 3.
He said that the plan also has the full support of the local medical officers of health in the communities in which schools had remained shuttered.
“We recognize the landscape has changed and we will not rest. We will continue to act and add additional layers of protection to our plan to protect your child and our staff in our schools,” he said.
Questions remain about impact of new variant
The province previously said that students in regions with the highest levels of COVID-19 transmission, including Toronto, Peel Region, York Region, Windsor-Essex, and Hamilton, would be learning from home until at least Feb. 10.
But signs had started to pile up in recent days that students would soon be returning to the classroom with Williams telling reporters on Monday that he wanted to ensure it was done in “full consultation” with local officials.
On Wednesday, he said that case counts are now back where they were in early December in most parts of Ontario, contributing to his confidence that schools can safely reopen.
While he said that there is some research suggesting that the new B.1.1.7 variant is being found in children at a “higher frequency" in the United Kingdom, he stressed that he still believes schools can reopen so long as community transmission is kept from getting out of control.
The co-chair of Ontario’s COVID-19 science table also made a similar comment last week, telling reporters that he believed schools can open even with the B.1.1.7 variant set to become the dominant COVID-19 strain in Ontario by March.
“The aspect of schools contributing to community spread we haven’t seen that,” Williams said. “Most of our cases were coming from the community and even some of the ones that have opened up already have identified a number of children who came already with some symptoms. They did not enter the school, they have been tested and a number have been found to be positive. That has been our experience all along.”
Rachel Huot with the Ontario Parent Action Network said she is concerned because the government is sending students and educations workers back to school without significant safety measures in place, given that variants of concern are circulating in the community.
Her group and other critics are calling on the government to reduce class sizes, implement enhanced paid sick leave, upgrade ventilation and roll out a comprehensive in-school testing program before the resumption of in-class learning.
"We haven't seen the government take any meaningful steps towards the safety measures that our students, our kids, need to stay safe and to stay in school," Huot said in an interview with CP24.
"The government needs to employ them and needs to make sure that they're strong, robust safety measures in order to have our kids protected from COVID and any new variants."
At this point it is unclear whether there will be any changes to March Break or the academic calendar but Lecce did say on Wednesday that his government would be able to provide more information on that “in the coming week.”
