Teachers, Education Workers, Principals & School Boards – Thank You!

September 1, 2020

Students across Ontario will be heading back to school very soon in some way, shape, or form. There continues to be a lot of anxiety and uncertainty; and there is still an unfathomable amount of work to do by teachers, education workers, principals, and school boards. In fact, Premier Ford is relying on school boards (and by extension, teachers, education workers, and principals) to make sure that the students and staff are in a very safe environment. The Fix Our Schools Campaign sincerely thanks all of these folks for joining the ranks of essential front-line workers in this province as students head back to school.

However, Fix Our Schools also questions how genuine our provincial government is being when Premier Ford has repeatedly stated that his government will spare (has spared?) no expense to ensure the safety of students, teachers, and education workers. Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur explores this same concern is his September 1, 2020 column entitled, “Doug Ford has done everything to make schools safe, according to Doug Ford”.

If Premier Ford’s primary concern was safety and he truly was going to spare no expense, he would have announced a lot more funding a lot earlier. Instead, Premier Ford’s government allocated $50-M for school boards to address HVAC and ventilation issues, an amount that nets out to a mere $10,000 per school in the province – and he announced this funding extremely late in the game for school boards to reasonably be able to conduct the work. Fix Our Schools questions the intent of our Ministry of Education outlining “best practices” in this memo, issued to all school boards last week – when surely they know that the funding and time allotted to school boards does not allow them to achieve these best practices?

Similarly, Fix Our Schools questions how Premier Ford’s government approaches mathematical calculations. Last week, the federal government allocated an additional $2-B to provinces to assist with a safe return to school, amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While certainly late in the game, this additional funding meant an additional $763-million for Ontario, bringing the total investment in Ontario to approximately $1.3-B. While Premier Ford would have us believe that his government had already allocated $900-M to a safe return to school, Fix Our Schools believes that a more accurate picture of provincial funding is closer to $540-M, as outlined in this excellent breakdown provided by Ricardo Tranjan of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

This is a lot of money, to be sure – but will it be sufficient? Only time will tell as we see how the Ontario return to school plan actually unfolds in the coming weeks. In the Saturday, August 29 edition of the Globe & Mail, the front-page article entitled, “How safe is school? It depends on your neighbourhood” states that, “while those in-class precautions, such as mandating masks and physical distancing, certainly matter, there is broad agreement among experts that what happens outside school walls is just as important – if not more so – as the safety measures implemented inside.” In fact, Ashish Jha, the director of Harvard University’s Global Health Institute is quoted as saying, “Driving down transmission is the single biggest thing we can do.” and goes on to say that “In most, if not all, places across Canada, you really should be able to open up school safely. It’s not that there is zero risk. There’s never zero risk in the middle of a pandemic.”

This Globe and Mail article is worth perusing as it provides detailed analysis on cities across Canada, as well as neighbourhoods within those cities, ranking them according to a safe school reopening guide created by the Global Health Institute, Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and other groups at the university. Areas are rated as green, or safest to reopen schools, if they are reporting one or fewer new daily infections per 100,000 people on a seven-day average. An area is designated as red, or unsafe to reopen schools, if new daily case counts top 25 per 100,000. In between are yellow (1-10 daily new cases per 100,000) and orange (10-25 new cases) levels that call for varying degrees of caution.

Fix Our Schools shares in the collective anxiety of students, families, teachers, education workers, principals, school boards, and communities as we move towards schools re-opening in Ontario, questioning whether our provincial government has, indeed, done everything possible to ensure a safe return. Ontarians have worked together for six months to keep transmission rates low. Doug Ford may be relying on the school boards, teachers, education workers, and principals to keep everyone safe in schools but the people of Ontario are relying on him to not waste the work every one of us has put into keeping COVID-19 at bay.