SCHOOLS SHOW CAUTION
Public board returns with care
Even as tens of thousands of students at Ottawa's largest school board headed back to class Thursday, cases of COVID-19 are cropping up at French-language schools that opened a week ago.
Public health officials have warned to expect cases among students and staff when schools reopen as Ontario faces the fourth wave of the pandemic.
It didn't take long in Ottawa. Six students have tested positive for the virus at Ottawa's Le Conseil des écoles publiques de l'Est de l'Ontario since classes resumed Aug. 31, according to the board's
COVID -19 update posted Thursday.
That includes four students at Michaëlle-Jean elementary school, where three classes are currently closed, the update said.
One student at Gisèle-Lalonde elementary and another at Louis Riel secondary have also tested positive, according to the board.
Ottawa's French-language Catholic school board also opened schools on Aug. 31, but has not posted any information about COVID-19 cases. A note on the board's website said the Ministry of Education instructed it to start updating the COVID-19 data on Sept. 13.
There appears to be some confusion. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Education said school boards must report daily COVID-19 data on their websites, as they did last year.
However, boards have been given a few extra days “to get operationally settled” before reporting the data to the province, which is posted on a provincewide COVID in-schools website that is expected to resume “within the week,” the spokesperson said.
There were also some glitches in Ottawa on Thursday morning, when the public-health screening portal crashed temporarily as thousands of parents and students from the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board resumed the daily online COVID -19 symptom quiz.
Provincial and local public health officials say they are confident that vaccines and layers of public health measures at schools will be enough to control any outbreaks and to keep kids in class all year.
Many of the precautions from last year remain.
Wearing a mask, obsessive hand washing and the term “cohort” are second nature to students who have lived with disrupted pandemic schooling since March 2020.
But students flooding into Glebe Collegiate Institute on Thursday morning displayed the usual backto-school nerves and excitement.
Cheda Knight-Johnston, 16, greeted a gaggle of girlfriends with shrieks of excitement.
“Air hug!” she yelled, half-joking. “No touchy!”
“I'm so excited,” Knight-Johnston said. “Now it's a new year and we're all back together!”
High school students in urban areas like Ottawa, who were only allowed to attend in-person classes part-time last year in smaller groups, are back at school every day.
Knight-Johnston said she felt hopeful beginning her final year of high school.
“If the (COVID-19) numbers go down more, I think we'll be the first Grade 12s in two years to have a more normal year.”
Besides, it's all relative, she said.
“We have lived such restricted lives so that any little freedom is great.”
Jose Sanchez, 17, who arrived a week ago from Mexico, said he was looking forward to spending Grade 12 year at Glebe Collegiate. “To improve my English, to have good friends and to learn.”
Isabel Ransom and Purnima Robinson, both going into Grade 11, were practically bubbling over as they waited to file into school. “I'm excited for my subjects. They seem really interesting this year,” Robinson said.
Ransom said she was looking forward to seeing friends, biology class and to joining the Key Club.
The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board is taking a cautious approach, with extracurricular activities on hold for a few weeks.
“We really want to keep staff and students in schools,” Brett Reynolds, the board's associate director of education, said in an interview.
“I think it's that uncertainty that is one of the underlying causes of a lot of the worry and concern that we see in staff and students, having gone through 18 months now of in, out, unsure, are we out and for how long,” he said, referring to the Ping-Pong between in-person and at-home learning students have endured.
“Some people might think we are going too slow and are anxious for a return to quote unquote normal, but we think we'll get there as soon as we can,” he said.
“We really want to be prudent and not do anything to jeopardize that in-person learning, which we know to be so important for the majority of our staff and students.”
Reynolds said details on safety precautions for extracurricular activities were still being worked out.
Students may be able to do golf and cross-country running safely without wearing masks, for instance, but soccer players may require masks because it's a close-contact sport, he said.