THUNDER BAY – Local education leaders are expressing frustration with the Ford government after its last-minute announcement Monday that Ontario schools will move to virtual learning for at least two weeks.
Rich Seeley, district president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF), called the news “disappointing but not surprising,” saying it was set up by the government's "cheap" approach to school safety investments throughout the pandemic.
Monday’s announcement that classes will go virtual until at least Jan. 17 wasn’t a surprise, even if it overturned the return-to-school plan the government set just four days earlier, agreed Lakehead District School Board director of education Ian MacRae.
“It wasn’t unexpected,” he said. “We thought last week when they announced there would be a two-day hiatus, that was a little bit unreasonable.”
Teachers and other staff were working from home preparing for the transition back to online learning on Wednesday, while the board also began work to distribute digital technology to students, MacRae said.
Mike Judge, local president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO), said his union understood the Omicron variant, which has spiked COVID-19 cases to record levels in recent days, might make virtual learning an unfortunate necessity.
However, he said the measures announced by the government to improve school safety during that time were badly inadequate.
“My first reaction is, what are you going to do over the next two weeks to ensure a different return than could have taken place Wednesday?” he said. “I can appreciate wanting more time to get booster shots, to get vaccination in our 5- to 11-year-olds.
"If two weeks can do something to blunt that curve, then that’s great and we can get behind it… That being said, I don’t see the situation in schools changing.”
The government has said it will provide non-fitted N95 masks for teachers, three-ply cloth masks for students, and 3,000 new HEPA air filters across the province in the coming days.
It has remained silent on other actions Ontario’s teachers’ unions have called for, like shrinking class sizes, adding COVID-19 vaccines to the list of required immunizations for students, and providing HEPA filters in every classroom.
“We know we have classrooms of 30-plus students, we know we can’t socially distance,” Judge said. “We’ve been saying this for a long time, and I don’t want to be pointing to problems all the time, but we brought this forward intelligently, and I don’t see any plans to change that situation.”
The failure to implement those kinds of measures left the education system unprepared for Omicron, Seeley said.
“This is an avoidable closure of schools – they could have done better,” he said. “They’ve had two years to make schools safer… We essentially have an incompetent Progressive Conservative government that just reacts and doesn’t do any planning.”
Schools would likely have experienced significant staffing shortages if they had remained open, he said, given the explosion in new cases and isolation requirements.
The province has indicated the Lakehead District School Board will receive enough non-fitted N95 masks for all staff later this week, MacRae said, but he acknowledged the commitment of new HEPA filters was a relatively minor addition, with fewer than one per school province-wide.
That will come “nowhere near” covering the number of local classrooms currently without the devices, Seeley said.
While he welcomed the new masks and filters, MacRae said he's more focused on ways to up the student vaccination rate.
“We said from day one we hoped the government would mandate vaccinations, but they’re obviously not prepared to go that route,” he said. “That really is going to be the key, in spite of what the naysayers might feel.”
Just over 44 per cent of district residents aged 5 to 11 have received a first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to the health unit’s publicly available data.
MacRae said the school board was meeting with the health unit Tuesday to explore ways to boost student vaccination rates, including through strategies like vaccine clinics at schools.
It will be more difficult to get a picture of how the pandemic affects schools when they return to in-person learning. The government informed schools boards on Thursday it would stop collecting COVID-19 numbers from them, and suspend reporting new infections.
The memo from the Ministry of Education also suggested the dismissal of classes and cohorts may no longer be necessary when positive cases are confirmed.
Judge called that concerning, saying the ETFO wants to see case counts reported, though he emphasized he deferred to public health professionals on the best way to handle testing going forward.
“We have members who are very concerned – they want to know [accurately] what’s going on in their schools, and want the best opportunity to remain safe and go home healthy,” he said.
