Monthly Archives: October 2021

Standards and Funding: Much Needed for both Schools and Schoolyards

October 26, 2021
Schoolyards Count

Fix Our Schools was founded out of a belief that school building conditions matter. Research has demonstrated time and again that good school building conditions contribute directly to positive attitudes and elevated performance, as measured by fewer health complaints, improved student attendance and teacher retention, and higher test scores. Fix Our Schools also firmly believes that schoolyards matter – they must also be safe, healthy, and well-maintained places for Ontario’s students to play, learn, develop and exercise.

The recently released report entitled, “Schoolyards Count: How Ontario’s schoolyards measure up for health, physical activity and environmental learning” underscores not only the importance of schoolyards but also why, as Ontario emerges from the COVID-19-pandemic, the time is unequivocally now to prioritize both schoolyards and schools. Our provincial government is responsible for funding schools and schoolyards, and is also largely responsible for the associated public policies and decision-making processes that impact schools and schoolyards. Therefore, to prioritize schools and schoolyards, our provincial government must commit to policies and funding that prioritize Ontario’s children and the spaces in which they spend their days. 

According to the Schoolyards Count report, “both achievement and well-being are core purposes of the Ontario education system. Overall well-being includes cognitive, emotional, social, and physical elements. During the school week, children and youth spend half their waking hours at school – so schools share responsibility for getting them outside and active on those days.”

Among the findings on Ontario’s schoolyards presented in this telling report:

  • 73% of schoolyards scored less than half the optimum score
  • 26% of schoolyards were rated not suitable for play
  • 19% of schoolyards were rated not suitable for sports
  • 63% of schools had no dedicated outdoor learning space
  • 26% of schoolyards were not well-maintained
  • Speed limits and other traffic-calming and safety measures to ensure student safety as they walk or bike to school are severely lacking in Ontario’s schools
  • Inequity is significant between schoolyards, based on a school’s median family income

Fix Our Schools certainly agrees with the authors of this report that “As children return to school after eighteen months of education disruption, the importance of outdoor spaces at school has never been clearer.” And, we agree that a key recommendation coming out of this report is critical in making progress – that provincial standards must be developed for schoolyards. 

Provincial Standards for Schools and Schoolyards

As students headed back to class last year, in September 2020, Fix Our Schools noted that provincial standards for schools had never been more important, stating that our provincial government cannot grossly and chronically underfund public schools for over two decades, and then expect these buildings to provide the optimum environments for learning during a pandemic.

In fact, Fix Our Schools has been advocating for standards for Ontario’s schools since before the last provincial election in June 2018, when we successfully secured the commitment of 58 elected MPPs to develop and fund a standard of good repair for Ontario’s schools. We had felt this was an important issue for any new provincial government to take on because so many important aspects of our children’s learning environments are simply not reflected in the disrepair is assessed in Ontario’s schools. Specifically, the following aspects are excluded:

And, to that list, today we would add schoolyards! We wholeheartedly agree with the notion put forward in the Schoolyards Count report that, “the provincial government should work with partners – including school boards and municipalities – to establish minimum provincial standards for schoolyard quality.” 

Indeed, standards, metrics and funding will continue to be what Fix Our Schools advocates for in the coming months leading up to the next provincial election, scheduled for June 2022. Surely, one of the silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic will be a commitment to doing what is clearly the right thing – not only for the 2-million Ontario students, who deserve to spend their days in environments that meet a minimum standard, but also for citizens, who deserve to see that the investments made in schools and education have positive outcomes.

Rapid Testing in Schools

October 12, 2021

As schools across the United States were getting ready to open for the 2021/22 school year back in early August, the Centers for Disease Control and and Prevention (CDC) released guidance for COVID-19 prevention in K-12 schools.

Recognizing that multiple layers of protection were needed to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and keep schools safe, the CDC guidance included the following screening testing recommendations, essentially recommending that the higher the transmission rate within a school setting, the higher the need for rapid asymptomatic testing:

Schools in Ontario opened several weeks later than in the United States. Many parents, politicians, and experts have been advocating for rapid antigen testing in schools to be part of the layers of protection against COVID-19 here in Ontario.

As CBC reported on September 28, 2021, Sam Kaufman, a Toronto parent of an 8-year-old Toronto student, founded a grassroots rapid testing program at his son’s school, finding an Ontario supplier, driving hundreds of kilometres to pick up the kits multiple times a month and spreading the news by word of mouth. “I don’t understand why we wouldn’t use every tool we have to try to keep COVID out of our schools,” Kaufman said.

 

Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist with Toronto’s University Health Network, has been one of many experts who believes that rapid testing can play an important role in making indoor spaces such as schools safer. “They’re really there to answer the question: ‘Am I contagious with the virus right now?‘” Bogoch said. “Of course, they’re not perfect, but they’re pretty good at doing it and if they were distributed among families, I think we could do a lot of good with those tests.”

Biostatistician Ryan Imgrund has also been advocating for the use of rapid testing in schools, recently sharing this data analysis of COVID-19 cases in Ontario’s schools and comparing per capita case counts in schools to their surrounding communities:

NDP Education Critic Marit Stiles has been calling for comprehensive rapid testing in schools since early September. Ontario Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner issued the following comment in a press release in early October, “Almost one in every five schools across the province has COVID cases, and the recent Science Table modelling clearly shows that cases in children are increasing. Where are the rapid tests? Where are the lower class sizes? Where is the commitment to keeping our kids safe and schools open?” Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca was quoted as saying, “I am urging Doug Ford to step up to the plate and to do the right thing and to significantly deploy the rapid tests that are available here in Ontario.” in a National Observer article on September 29, 2021.

And yet, up until very recently, Premier Ford’s government and Ontario’s chief medical officer of health Kieran Moore had resisted implementing rapid testing programs in publicly funded schools, saying that widespread asymptomatic surveillance testing in schools was not an effective tool.

However, leading up to the Thanksgiving weekend, CTV covered Kieran Moore’s announcement that rapid antigen tests would start to be sent to Ontario schools that were at the highest risk of closure due to COVID-19 spread. Moore said that after reviewing data over the last couple of weeks, his thinking had evolved to see value in asymptomatic testing for unvaccinated students and, as such, local public health units would be given the green light to deploy rapid antigen test kits to schools assessed as “high-risk”. A “high-risk” school can be identified as such either because of ongoing detection of cases, an outbreak, the prevalence of COVID-19 in the surrounding community, or a combination of all three.

We will be following how the province’s new approach to rapid antigen testing in schools unfolds, and also wondering why this layer of protection took so long to be introduced and also wondering if only introducing rapid testing to high-risk schools is sufficient.