Monthly Archives: April 2021

Premier Ford: Get to Work Now!

April 27, 2021

Amidst a crushing third wave of COVID, Ontario students, families, teachers, and education workers are currently contending with the third shutdown of schools, and any in-person learning. Heart-breaking, overwhelming, disappointing, and stressful are just a few of the adjectives people have been sharing with us to describe how this feels. Ontario’s students deserve to get back to school and in-person learning as soon as safely possible.

What Could Have Been Done Differently?

While Fix Our Schools always endeavours to be forward-thinking and solution-oriented, we feel that a brief review of recent history is needed in order to learn, and move forward. And, recent history in Ontario clearly shows that our provincial government has consistently opted for inaction, the wrong actions, and downplaying the seriousness of COVID-19 instead of taking actions based on research, data, and the recommendations of its own Science Table and experts. Recent history also shows us that the Ford government has never truly prioritized the importance of publicly funded schools and education; and that our provincial government has never truly prioritized the health and well-being of Ontario’s students, families, teachers, and education workers.

In Spring 2020, a forward-looking provincial government could have taken the opportunity, while students learned at home, to conduct repairs and maintenance that can be challenging (and sometimes dangerous) to do while students are in school.

In May 2020, Fix Our Schools noted that “while it is clearly a challenging time in our education system, as students and teachers alike grapple with at-home learning, there would be a benefit to conducting construction projects in schools at this time. In recent years, the volume of reactive repairs needed at schools has necessitated that construction projects, such as roofing, often get done while students are trying to learn in these buildings. So a “silver lining” of this current pandemic situation, when children are absent from schools, is that many construction projects could get completed while these buildings are virtually empty.”

In Summer 2020, the Ford government could have listened to the science, research, and data presented and invested the funding that was actually required to ensure that physical distancing was possible in all classrooms, that all classrooms had adequate ventilation, and that every school had adequate caretaking staff for hand hygiene to be easily accessible and available. As early as June 2020, SickKids cited proper ventilation as an important element in any safe return to school plan. At that point, Fix Our Schools began collecting information from across Ontario about the state of ventilation in Ontario’s schools.

We heard from dozens of parents, educators, and education workers across the province with a myriad of issues pertaining to ventilation, including classrooms without windows, windows that do not open at all or that only open a tiny bit, and some older schools and portables without HVAC systems to bring in fresh air from outside. Fix Our Schools shared those details and urged citizens to contact Premier Ford, Minister Lecce, and their local MPP to request adequate funding to address ventilation issues in schools and classrooms. However, the Ford government provided only $50-million of funding for ventilation improvements ($10,000 per school) in August 2020 – months after SickKids first identified ventilation as a key aspect of a safe return to school. 

In Fall 2020, Ontario schools did open for in-person learning. However, a significant portion of families living in “hot spot communities”, where COVID rates were high, chose to keep their children home for online learning. Families made this difficult choice because the in-person learning options at local schools did not feel safe, knowing that community spread was significant. Throughout the Fall months, Minister Lecce and Premier Ford continued to claim Ontario’s schools were safe, without ever mentioning that their statistics relied heavily on families in hot spot communities keeping their children out of school to pursue online learning. This fact is rarely mentioned in media coverage of public education during the pandemic and represents yet another way in which marginalized communities have been disproportionately negatively impacted by the COVID pandemic.

In Winter 2021, our provincial government continued to ignore the recommendations of SickKids, medical professionals, public health professionals, education professionals, and, indeed, it ignored the recommendations of civil servants within the Ministry of Education when this government implemented only “half-measures” to ensure the safety of students and education workers in the classroom amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.  Instead, it chose to politicize the issue of safe, healthy schools in the midst of a pandemic, and continued to underfund Ontario schools and its education system, all the while claiming it prioritized Ontario’s children.

As Spring 2021 continues to unfold, we have seen Premier Ford and his government choose to cling to the same playbook of inaction, ignorance, and playing politics amidst a horrific third wave that has overrun our ICUs and shuttered our schools once again. As one member of the Ontario Science Table, Andrew Morris, said after Ford’s announcements on Friday, April 16, “It was mind-boggling. I’m still in shock“.  On April 20 2021 Ontario’s Science Table came forward with a very clearly articulated outline of what should have been done, and a clear plan for what still can be done to move forward and stem the tide of this crushing third wave.

The Way Forward

Doug Ford, please get to work on quickly implementing the recommendations clearly outlined by Ontario’s Science Table:

  1. Permit only truly essential indoor workplaces to stay open, and strictly enforce COVID-safety rules in those workplaces
  2. Pay essential workers to stay home when they are sick, exposed, and need time to get vaccinated
  3. Accelerate the vaccination of essential workers and those living in hot spots
  4. Limit mobility
  5. Focus on public health guidance that works, encouraging outdoor small gatherings, with physical distancing and masks
  6. Keep people safely connected, allowing people from different households to meet outdoors with masks and physical distance, and encouraging safe outdoor activities

Ontario’s children need to get back to school and in-person learning as soon as is safely possible. The ball is in your court Premier Ford. You’ve wasted critical weeks now on inaction, actions that make no sense or cause further harm, and on downplaying the health crisis in which we now find ourselves. The answers and the way forward have been presented to you time and again. Please step up now, and do what needs to be done to address the root causes of COVID spread and get Ontario’s students back to school.

Research, Data and Science: Critical to Good Policies and Funding Decisions

April 13, 2021

NO RESEARCH, DATA, OR SCIENCE AS YET TO SUPPORT EXPANDING ONLINE LEARNING 

As COVID-19 numbers in Ontario have been growing exponentially, and our hospital ICU capacity approaching its limits, students, families, teachers, principals, education workers, and school boards have been anxiously tracking whether schools would continue to be open for in-person learning, how childcare would be managed if schools were closed, whether the postponed March break would happen, and the list goes on. These past few weeks, we have been experiencing a tremendous amount of uncertainty and stress, related directly to the COVID-pandemic. And, amidst this incredible uncertainty and stress, Premier Ford and Minister Lecce have proposed legislation that would fundamentally change Ontario’s publicly funded education system by expanding online learning in Ontario. Wow.

As Annie Kidder, Executive Director of People for Education, said in this interview on The Agenda, “in a crisis, nobody is totally paying attention, and you can sneak in an enormous change to the entire public education system.”

Expressing similiar concerns, Martin Regg Cohn asserts in his April 13 opinion piece in the Toronto Star entitled, “Don’t let Doug Ford’s incompetence fool you. His plan for schools shows he hasn’t forgotten his political agenda” that amidst a COVID-19 crisis, the Ford government is abusing its mandate, misusing public funds, and wasting precious ministerial bandwidth on pursuing an expansion of online learning in Ontario, when there is no proven demand nor any public policy justification.

Fix Our Schools agrees with Annie Kidder and Martin Regg Cohn, and worries that the Ford government is using the cover of the COVID-19 crisis to push an agenda that could cause irreparable damage to Ontario’s public education system. Premier Ford’s recent provincial budget provided no new money for publicly funded education. So, make no mistake, expanding online learning would take money directly from schools, classrooms, and in-person learning. And let’s remember that Ontario students attend schools with a mind-blowing $16.3-B repair backlog so every dollar for schools and classrooms counts.

As the Chair of the Rainbow Board, the largest school board in Northern Ontario, said in this CTV Article, “If we split the delivery of education into several different options that are available, none of them will be properly funded“.  So, while Premier Ford and Minister Lecce claim that parents want this “choice” of online learning, we must highlight that that this choice comes with a cost to the quality of in-person learning in this province.

Also important to note is that Premier Ford’s proposal to fundamentally change the way education is delivered in this province has been put forward without a mandate from the electorate and without any understanding of the impact that this year of online learning has had on students. There is simply no data, research, or science as yet on the impact of online learning on students’ learning, social skills, and mental health. Without research and data to support the expansion of online learning, we simply cannot know if this is a prudent course of action pedagogically.

The only thing we do know is that this course of action sets up the provincial government to save money (and possibly even make money) on the delivery of public education. As the Toronto Star’s editorial on April 12, 20021 stated, “such an absurdly speedy timeline for a very controversial shift in education policy can only be a deliberate attempt by the Ford government to ram this through while people are struggling with pandemic life and focused on getting vaccines for themselves and their loved ones. Even to propose permanently expanding the use of online learning before fixing the many problems with quality and access that have been demonstrated with its use in the pandemic can only be about money. Specifically saving money, and possibly even making money by selling online courses internationally.”

After thirteen months of a pandemic that has laid bare the criticality of schools and education to students, families, communities, and our economy, we would expect our provincial government to be looking at policies that are backed by research and data, and that seek to invest in education and in the success and well-being of Ontario’s students. 

IGNORING DATA, RESEARCH, AND SCIENCE SEEMS COMMONPLACE FOR PREMIER FORD

Now, the fact that the Ford government is proposing legislation to expand online learning without any data, research, or science supporting said legislation should, perhaps, come as no surprise. Even back in the summer, as Premier Ford and Minister Lecce were developing what was purported to be a safe back-to-school plan, they ignored data, research, and science.

In fact, in late August, Premier Ford was counting on school boards to work miracles to ensure schools were safe amidst the pandemic. Given that his government had ignored several components of what had been confirmed by data, research, and science to be integral to a safe school environment, such as proper ventilation, proper physical distancing, and any standard of good repair for public schools in Ontario, Ford’s confidence in school boards could be construed as simply passing the buck.

As we said to Premier Ford back in late August, “your government has treated public education and schools as an afterthought; been slow to provide guidance; continuously flip-flopped on said guidance; and, most disappointing is that your government has continued the long-standing provincial tradition of chronic and gross underfunding of public education and schools – while pushing accountability and responsibility for working miracles down to school boards, teachers, principals, and education workers.”

Fast forward to the third wave of COVID-19 in Ontario. Premier Ford and Minister Lecce have been clinging to the claim that Ontario’s schools are safe. And yet, several jurisdictions such as Peel and Toronto closed schools to in-person learning, with local public health agencies enacting Section 22 to break from the Province. One could argue that the degree of safety that has been experienced in schools since September has come at the expense of families in hot-spot COVID areas, who opted to keep their children home because they did not believe the school plan was safe. In essence, the Ford government relied on families making hard decisions about whether to send their children back to in-person learning. And, in the past week, Ford’s government relied on local public health agencies to make the hard decisions on closing schools. When will we see Premier Ford’s government start to use science, data, and research to make the hard decisions to provide some leadership amidst this ongoing pandemic?

AND JUST ONE MORE EXAMPLE OF FORD IGNORING SCIENCE, DATA, AND RESEARCH

Fix Our Schools is at a loss as to what to even say about the Ford government choosing to spend $850,000 on Pine-Sol disinfectants when the CDC has confirmed that while people can get infected with COVID-19 from contaminated surfaces, the risk is low, cleaning with soap or detergent in most instances is sufficient, and the most reliable way to prevent infection from surfaces is washing hands.

So Fix Our Schools would propose that a much better investment of this $850,000 would have been on increasing the number of caretakers in Ontario’s schools, whose jobs include the important task of ensuring soap dispensers are filled and in working order so that students can properly and readily wash their hands.

Research, science, and data abound in this age of information. And yet, Ford’s government consistently and consciously chooses to ignore research, science, and data.