Facts, not spin, needed on school reopenings

Governments are experts at splitting hairs and fudging words when they make announcements. It’s called spin, and it just seems to come with the territory.

But there is a time and a place for everything.

In the middle of a pandemic when caseloads and death rates remain high, uncertainty surrounds the vaccination program and we’ve all been ordered to stay home when possible — well, this isn’t the time for obfuscation.

When the provincial government announced this week that schools will reopen Monday, it said it had “the unanimous recommendation of the Council of Medical Officers of Health and with the support of local medical officers of health.”

Those are its own words.

Translated to the language the rest of us speak, it should have read: “Generally speaking, those medical officers of health believe the time is right to send kids back to the classroom. We gave them a few minutes to think over our idea, none of them said no, so here we go!”

Or as Niagara’s acting medical officer of health Dr. Mustafa Hirji told Niagara dailies, “I don’t think it is accurate to say that we ‘endorsed a plan’ to reopen schools — we were not privy to such a plan until after (Wednesday’s) announcement.”

Things like that — blurring the details, telling only part of the story — aren’t a help when we’ve all had our fill of the anxiety and mystery and loss of routine COVID-19 has thrown at us for nearly a year now.

Plainly, in this case, if you have a plan, show it to the health experts and give them at least a day to think about it and respond, polish it, and then release it. What we’re saying is, the message didn’t have to be mixed.

There are plenty of good reasons to want to return our children to the classroom, starting with their mental health and our own. After learning at home for most of the last school year, then returning to school from September until Christmas and being kept home again until Monday, medical experts believe children need their friends back, and their teachers and their routines. On the other hand, schools in Ontario’s so-called hot zones — Toronto, Peel and York — won’t reopen until at least Feb. 16, after the Family Day long weekend.

Niagara’s rates of infection and death are on par with those areas, so why are our kids going back Monday while theirs aren’t? Despite that, Niagara West MPP Sam Oosterhoff, a government member, said the decisions on who can and can’t reopen were based on science, not politics.

In the end, you won’t know until you try. But nagging doubts remain.

Since the start of the school year, here’s how the COVID-19 situation stands in Niagara schools, based on websites of the Niagara Catholic District School Board and District School Board of Niagara. Combined, the public and Catholic boards operate about 165 schools across the region. They employ about 7,500 teachers and support staff and have about 57,000 students enrolled. Since September, the boards have reported just under 100 in-school COVID-19 cases combined. Roughly100 positive tests in a student/teacher/staff population of about 65,000.

Much of the stricter safety measures the education ministry says it will require involve tinkering. Kids in grades 1 through 3 will also have to wear masks. Students will be discouraged from congregating before and after school.

Meanwhile, we’d like to know more about its plan for on-site asymptomatic testing.

There will always be questions and doubts, so government, please, just give us the news. Not the spin.