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Ontario school boards will make decisions about COVID-19 closures, adjustments

The province announced new guidelines that will determine what general restrictions will be in place depending on the threat the virus poses. Ottawa is in the orange or "restrict" category.

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School boards will decide what form of schooling is safe for Ontario’s two million elementary and secondary students as we head into a long, uncertain coronavirus winter, says the province’s Education Ministry.

Decisions about whether schools will operate full-time, part-time or close in favour of online education at home will be left up to local school boards acting on the advice of their medical officers of health, according to Education Minister Stephen Lecce’s office.

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When the back-to-school strategy was adopted in the fall, the province directed school boards on what type of instruction to offer, which now varies by grade and region.

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Boards had to plan for three potential scenarios: full-time school with regular class sizes; a hybrid model where students attend school part-time with classes limited to about 15 students and study at home the rest of the time; and full-time remote learning at home.

Ontario elementary school are currently open full time. High schools in some designated boards, mainly in urban areas such as Ottawa, operate on a hybrid model. In other boards, high schools operate full time with regular class sizes.

All boards must also offer virtual classes for any students who chose to study at home this year.

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Decisions about shifting back and forth between the three scenarios will now be up to school boards, depending on the COVID-19 situation in their regions, the Education Ministry confirmed to the Citizen.

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The province has also announced guidelines that will determine what general restrictions on businesses and other enterprises will be in place depending on the threat the virus poses. Ottawa is in the orange or “restrict” category under guidelines announced Tuesday.

Those guidance documents do not mention schools, other than to emphasize that a goal of the province is to keep them open.

“The schools are in a different area,” said Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health David Williams during a press conference Tuesday. “We have opened those up with a lot of protection in place.” That includes more staff, public health nurses, personal protective equipment for staff and mandatory masks for older students, and placing students into cohorts to reduce mixing with others.

Williams said that in many cases, students arrive at school COVID-19 positive because they have contracted the virus from someone at home or in the community.

Williams noted that no schools in Ontario were closed earlier this week, although the province’s daily COVID-19 data dashboard reported Tuesday that one school is now closed due to an outbreak.

The number of cases at school is rising steadily, though, especially in COVID hot spot zones like Ottawa. Currently just under 12 per cent of Ontario schools have reported COVID-19 among students or staff.

Williams echoed what is common advice among public health experts: the best way to keep schools safe is to keep the level of COVID-19 in the community low.

Children can transmit COVID-19.

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And schools can act as accelerators in spreading the virus, said Raywat Deonandan, an epidemiologist who teaches at the University of Ottawa.

However, it’s difficult to determine if that is happening in Ontario because the contact tracing system is “broken,” he said.

Currently, in most COVID-19 cases in the province, it’s not known where the person contracted the virus.

“From a population perspective we want to make sure schools are not bioreactors and incubators that are keeping this thing firing along,” said Deonandan. “And to determine that we need to be able to trace the cases to determine: did they originate from school contact or not?

“Having the inability to do that tells us that we don’t know. We just don’t know.”

The “go to” indicators for decision-makers on whether to impose restrictions such as school closures are the number of new COVID-19 cases a day and the percentage of tests that are positive for COVID-19, he said. Another consideration is the “downstream” effect on hospitals and whether they are able to handle the caseload.

The test positivity rate is particularly key, said Deonandan.

When it inches above five per cent, “it’s time to give serious thought to closing schools,” he said.

The test positivity rate in Ontario is currently four per cent.

jmiller@postmedia.com

twitter.com/JacquieAMiller

Editors note: A previous version of this story said school board trustees would decide which of three scenarios of instruction will be adopted at school boards. In fact, those decision will be made by school board administrators. 

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