Students not going back to schools on Monday
Ottawa elementary and secondary students won't be allowed to return to in-person classes on Monday, the province has decided.
The government has not indicated how long students will continue remote learning at home in Ottawa and other regions of the province that were not given the go-ahead to reopen schools.
Schools in seven public-health unit regions in southern and eastern Ontario can return to bricksand-mortar schooling Monday: Renfrew County; Leeds, Grenville and Lanark; Peterborough; Grey Bruce; Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge; Hastings and Prince Edward Counties; and Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox & Addington.
The news came shortly after Ottawa's Medical Officer of Health Vera Etches said schools in the city could be ready to open Monday, and returning kids to in-person class is a top priority.
Although Ottawa would still land in the red zone in the province's colour-coded pandemic guide, the trends are encouraging, Etches said at a news conference Wednesday.
The number of reported cases is lower than a few weeks ago, test positivity rates are improving and wastewater counts of the virus are no longer increasing in the city, she said.
“We are ready to support our schools opening on Monday.”
Etches acknowledged the challenges of keeping schools open when community spread of the virus is a threat.
Parents should be vigilant in screening their children for symptoms of COVID-19 and getting them tested if necessary, she said.
“The testing must continue, even if children are not attending school in person, to make schools safer when they do return.”
Even when children are studying virtually, infection can spread from children to members of their household and to others in the community, putting pressure on health-care systems and possibly leading to an extension of the lockdown, Etches said.
Children should not be in contact with people outside their household except when they do return to school, she said.
“School has the screening, school has the cohorts, school has infection-control measures, all of those things need to be reinforced, and we can't increase the likelihood of transmission among children by restarting extracurricular activities.
“Those need to be still off-limits. It's still stay at home, except for when children go to school, that's their essential work to do. That's the approach we need to take.”
The number of cases of COVID -19 in Ontario also is trending gently downward, but that varies by region.
When Ontario students returned to school on Jan. 4, after the holiday break, they were all shifted to remote learning for what was supposed to be a week. That has been extended for various amounts of time depending on the region.
In-person schooling has already resumed in northern Ontario. Students in the hard-hit regions of Toronto, Peel, York, Hamilton and Windsor-Essex, meanwhile, were told earlier that they would be learning at home until Feb. 10. Wednesday's news release from the government did not include a date for their return.
The extension of learning at home will be difficult not only for students who benefit academically and socially from going to school, but for their parents who are trying to work.
Ontario has provided emergency daycare for the school-aged children of essential workers. Other parents are scrambling, including the teachers and education workers who provide virtual learning.
Daycare centres remain open, but are not allowed to accept school-aged children.
Education Minister Stephen Lecce has said he is determined to get all students back to in-person learning but the government's first priority is keeping kids safe.
The government's news release contained no details on what metrics the province used to determine which regions could resume in-person learning.
Some school boards that straddle several public-health regions will have some schools allowed to reopen on Jan. 25 and others in which students remain at home. Information is to be provided by local health units in those boards, which include the Upper Canada District School Board, the Catholic District School Board of Eastern Ontario, the Conceal des écoles publiques de l'Est de l'Ontario and the Conceal scolaire de district catholique du Centre-Est de l'Ontario.
Lecce maintains that safety protocols have worked up to now and allowed schools to operate from September to December.
“To ensure schools remain safe, the government is introducing additional measures including provincewide targeted asymptomatic testing, enhanced screening, mandatory masking for students in Grades 1-3 and outdoors where physical distancing cannot be maintained,” he said in a statement.
Critics have called on the government to reduce class sizes to allow for distancing; improve ventilation; widespread asymptomatic testing; beefed-up contract tracing; and income supports to ensure people can self-isolate.