Ontario’s Directives for Return to School

August 10, 2021

On August 3, 2021, Ford’s government released a 26-page document outlining its directives for elementary and secondary students returning to school five days per week for the first time in months. As Robin Ureck noted in this Globe and Mail opinion piece from August 5, 2021 entitled, “Ontario’s COVID-19 back-to-school plan: hoping, praying and replaying”,  “one would think the Ford government would throw absolutely everything in its arsenal at this last vulnerable space: a comprehensive rapid testing program, ventilation overhauls with monitoring, windows that actually open in all classrooms, vaccination requirements for teachers and older students, and so forth. Instead, it seems to have merely recycled last year’s plan, tweaked a few details and added in some questionable new permissions.”

 

Opposition parties have universally lambasted the Ford government’s directives on back to school for September 2021:

 

Education advocates have also expressed concerns about Ford’s back-to-school directives. Annie Kidder, Executive Director of People for Education, has noted how surprising it is that there was hardly anything about vaccinations or about what would happen if there is an outbreak in schools outlined in the Ford government’s back-to-school directives.

 

Wendy Goodes took the Ontario Science Table’s recommendations and compared those to what was actually released by the Ford government, to highlight many shortcomings of Ontario’s directives for back-to-school this September.

And the Ontario Parent Action Network (OPAN) expressed its disappointment to the Ford government’s directives for September immediately following the announcement.

https://twitter.com/parentaction4ed/status/1422922051262767105

 

And folks such as Amy Greer, who was a co-author on the Ontario Science Table school document expressed outrage about the Ford government’s return to school directives.

Much like last year’s directives on back-to-school from the Ford government, this year’s directives appear to rely heavily on low community spread of COVID-19 and its Delta variant in order for schools to be safe. With Ontario’s reproduction rate at 1.38 and daily counts rising, Ford’s “plan” seems like anything but a good one for our children’s safe return to in-person learning five days a week this September.