Want information about COVID in schools? What you receive will depend on the board
On Friday the Ottawa-Carleton District School board reported that 40 students and four staff had active cases of COVID-19.
Yet not a single classroom or “cohort” — such as students riding the bus or at daycare — was closed in any of the 29 schools with active cases, according to the board's daily update.
The same day the Ottawa Catholic School Board reported 23 people with active cases of COVID-19 at 14 schools. But at that board 15 classes and four cohorts were closed.
Why the difference in class closures when the boards operate under the same public health rules? Anyone who is a close contact of someone at school with COVID-19 must go home and self-isolate for 14 days. Usually, if a child tests positive the entire class is sent home.
The discrepancy is less about rules and more about reporting. The two boards have made different choices about what information to provide to the public under the category of “closure.”
In fact, students and teachers at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board have been sent home to self-isolate, too, it's just not reflected in their data.
It's one example of the variations in information about COVID-19 provided by school boards in Ottawa and across the province. Those differences in information make it hard to get an understanding of how the virus is affecting schools.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has emphasized the importance of providing information about COVID-19 in schools, and the province publishes a list of every school that has an active case.
That information is only updated on weekdays, however, and often lags several days behind the data posted by school boards.
And the impact of the virus on schools is not limited to the students and teachers who contract it.
Students and education workers across the city have been ordered to self-isolate after they were exposed to COVID-19 at school. That disrupts both the education of students sent home to study and their families as many parents are forced to take time off work.
Officials at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board say its reporting meets the requirements of the Ministry of Education, which says boards must post a notice of “any closures of classes, cohorts or schools.”
A “closure” is declared by Public Health, usually in conjunction with an outbreak. “Closures” are rare.
But public health officials always inform anyone who was in close contact with someone at school who has tested positive to self-isolate for 14 days.
Consider a typical case: A kindergarten student at Elgin Street Public School developed COVID-19 last month. Everyone in the class was sent home to isolate, says parent Breanne Leblanc, whose daughter was among them. However, the class was not “closed” so it was not reported as such on the board website.
The board maintains reporting the number of classes and cohorts sent home could be misleading.
“Our experience to date indicates that where there is a single positive confirmed case in a school, sometimes many students in the class were deemed high-risk contacts and required to self-isolate, and in other cases, there were very few to no high risk contacts,” said a statement from the board.
The Ottawa Catholic School Board takes a different approach.
“For sake of full transparency, we report every class and every cohort that has been sent home as a result of a positive case in one of their classes,” said a statement from director Tom D'Amico. “If we only reported closed classes and cohorts when an entire school was closed, we would be missing the true picture of classes that are learning from home due to a positive case of COVID-19 in the school. "The (Education) Ministry has recognized that boards are reporting the data differently, and we anticipate a ministry memo to clarify."
The Citizen asked the Ministry of Education whether it plans to issue more guidance to schools on what data to report. Officials did not answer the question, but provided a summary of current guidelines, which say that boards must report closures as well as “information” about confirmed cases among students and staff. That leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
For instance, all four Ottawa-area school boards report “active” cases, although the French Catholic board doesn't specify if the cases are among students or staff.
The two French-language boards also list the number of resolved cases at each school. The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board posts the total number of resolved cases across the board, while the Ottawa Catholic School Board doesn't provide that information.
What information should be public? It's a balancing act between protecting the privacy of people who have COVID-19 and informing the school and broader community during a pandemic.
“The first rule during a crisis is to provide accurate, honest, and timely information,” wrote Patti Bacchus, an education columnist at Georgia Straight and a former longtime chair of the Vancouver School Board, in a column urging fuller disclosure of COVID-19 at schools in that province.
Bacchus wrote about parents in Vancouver who were unable to find sufficient official informa
tion about COVID-19 exposures in schools so they relied on Facebook. But does the community need to know not only when there is a COVID-19 case at school, but also how many students and staff have been ordered to self-isolate?
Consider a case last month at Ottawa's Hillcrest High School. The school board website reported only that one staff member had COVID-19 at Hillcrest but there were no “closures.”
When the Citizen inquired, the board explained 14 staff were directed to isolate for 14 days after being identified by public health authorities as high-risk close contacts of another staff member who had COVID-19. The circumstances are unclear. No students were considered close contacts.
Staff were working at least two metres apart, but Ottawa Public Health decided that “the nature of the work and the workspace required repeated interaction between some employees and the individual who tested positive.”
The school board has a responsibility to respect the private health information of students and staff, said the board.