Ontario’s Children Deserve So Much Better

May 18, 2021

“Leadership is not a rank, it is a responsibility. Leadership is not about being in charge, it is about taking care of those in your charge. ”           – Simon Sinek

During the last 14 months, Premier Ford and Minister Lecce have consistently failed to take care of Ontario’s children, their schools and education, and their mental health. Full stop.

Let’s Do Our Part as Citizens to Advocate for Ontario’s Children

As Ontario’s children continue to learn online and struggle to manage the ongoing uncertainty and complexity of this pandemic, Fix Our Schools urges every parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, teacher, education worker, and caring citizen to take a few minutes this week to advocate for our children. Please contact Premier Ford at premier@ontario.ca or 416-325-1941, and Minister Lecce at stephen.lecce.pc.ola.org or 416-325-2600, as well as your local MPP.

As a campaign that has been advocating for safe, healthy, well-maintained schools since 2014, we suspect that most of you are as disappointed as we are in our provincial’s government failure to take care of Ontario’s children, their schools and education, and their mental health. So we urge you to share your concerns, frustrations, and disappointments with our provincial leaders. Tell them how school closures and online learning are impacting the children in your life.  

When enough people take action and raise their voice collectively, positive change is possible. Solutions can be found and funding can be found when the political will exists to focus on a priority. Let’s work together to make Ontario’s children a priority now. 

As two doctors wrote in an opinion piece entitled, For the sake of the kids, don’t write off the school year just yet, “we cannot let children and youth become the pandemic’s collateral damage. School doors should be the first to open and the last to close.“

A Key Part of Prioritizing Ontario’s Children is to Prioritize Schools

Fix Our Schools has advocated for seven years for safe, healthy, well-maintained schools that provide environments conducive to learning and working. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in Spring 2020, prioritizing schools as critical infrastructure has become essential. The need for stable, adequate provincial funding to address the $16.3-billion of disrepair that existed in Ontario’s schools prior to the pandemic is evident, as is a standard of good repair for Ontario’s schools. And certainly, the need for proper ventilation in classrooms and schools to prevent COVID’s aerosol spread has received a lot of attention during the pandemic.

In a recent CBC interview, Dr. Fisman, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and one of the co-authors of a recent Lancet paper about the airborne nature of COVID, noted that indoor spaces (where people from different households gather, like schools) “need to be well ventilated by opening the windows, cleaning the air with HEPA filters, or upgrading ventilation systems.”  In this May 10, 2021 Globe and Mail opinion piece, Dr. Fisman furthers his call to action that our primary public health policies to mitigate the spread of COVID must shift from two metres distancing and hand-washing to ventilation and high-quality masks. Fisman suggests that monitoring ventilation using portable carbon dioxide monitors is key to success, as is opening windows and improving ventilation or air filtration when ventilation systems are poor. There are many schools (and wings within Ontario schools) without any mechanical ventilation.

In a May 17, 2021 investigation piece in the Toronto Star entitled, “Blind spots raised over ventilation rules“, ventilation is cited as key: “Based on the latest scientific evidence, two metres distance with masking may not be sufficient if ventilation is poor or unknown indoors“. And, one dad in Quebec took air quality testing into his own hands and found that schools without air purifiers have three to four times more COVID-cases.

All of these findings confirm the SickKids report recommendations provided to our provincial government back in June, 2020, stating that proper ventilation was going to be a key to safe schools and classrooms amidst the COVID-pandemic. At that time, Fix Our Schools crowd-sourced ventilation issues across the province and found an alarming number of classrooms with no windows, windows that did not open, and schools with no mechanical ventilation systems. As we shared with Global TV in early September, “while the Ontario government has allocated $50 million in funding to improve HVAC systems in schools, it came only two months before classes were due to begin. It also came long after SickKids’ report cited ventilation as an important element in a safe reopening, as well as guidance from the Public Health Agency of Canada”. And as we expressed in this late August news piece, “the province knew months ago that air quality issues would need to addressed, and it should have allocated the funding sooner. On the ground, principals, teachers, school boards, education workers will actually make this a safe environment, but it will be a herculean effort. It will be underfunded by the Province, and it will be a small miracle that it all comes together.”

 

Almost eleven months from when we first crowd-sourced data from you about ventilation in schools and nine months from the time that our provincial government announced an initial $50-M in funding for ventilation, what does ventilation look like now in your local school? We’re interested in once again crowd-sourcing real, on-the-ground information from parents, teachers, caretakers, principals, and education workers. We asked you before and we’re asking again now to please contact us today with the following:

  • name of your local school
  • any ventilation improvements that have been made (ventilation system improvement projects, introduction of air purifiers to classrooms, ensuring windows can be open)
  • any ventilation issues you may still have concerns about
  • your local MPP and/or the name of your provincial riding.

We will compile this data over the coming weeks and share our findings. Ontario’s children have been failed time and again during the COVID-pandemic. They deserve better. The way to achieve this is to create the political will within the Ford government to actually start prioritizing children, their schools and education, and their mental health.