Get students back to schools, Ontario mayors of big cities urge

Mayors of Ontario’s largest cities want the provincial government to reopen schools next week, saying that children’s mental and physical health is “paramount” and that any further delay would only cause further distress.

In a motion passed at a meeting Monday afternoon, Ontario’s Big City Mayors (OBCM) said they support calls from pediatric experts and parents to resume face-to-face classes on Monday. .

The motion, moved by Kingston Mayor Bryan Paterson and seconded by Patrick Brown of Brampton, passed unanimously.

He says “we do everything we can to make sure kids can go back to school, learning in person on January 17,” Brown said in a telephone interview. “It is very clear that there are strong opinions from medical health officials and pediatric specialists in the province that the best thing for children is to learn with their peers.”

He said there is a “cost to society”, given the academic losses and the cost to children’s mental health for learning remotely, so the mayors hope that the “province will not delay any longer in bringing the children. back to school … I don’t see what an extra week of preparation would accomplish in addition to more heartache for the children. “

The province is expected to announce later this week whether the students will return to school on January 17, which Prime Minister Doug Ford said was the earliest possible date.

The return of students to school on January 3 was initially delayed until January 5 to allow for the distribution of N95 masks and additional HEPA air filter units to schools. However, Ford later said that a “tsunami” of COVID-19 cases, due to the highly communicable Omicron variant, forced them to move to online classes for two weeks.

Sources told the Star that the government is considering allowing high schools to reopen first, given the 90 percent vaccination rate among teens.

Less than half of children ages 5 to 12 have received their vaccinations, for which they became eligible at the end of November.

Experts at Sick Kids and Ottawa’s CHEO Children’s Hospital have also urged a back to school, as well as business and community leaders who wrote an open letter that appeared in Star and other Torstar publications.

Students from some provinces returned to classes on Monday. Those from Quebec are scheduled to return on January 17.

“We are on the front line with our residents, we hear directly from our residents,” Brown said. The lack of schooling for children “is causing real anguish for parents. They are worried about their children ”.

Meanwhile, the Ontario government announced that it again reached an agreement with the Ontario Federation of Teachers that allows retired teachers to log more hours in classrooms to help alleviate anticipated labor shortages when schools reopen. , from the usual 50 days to 95.

It also continues a program announced last year that allows student-teachers to work as substitute teachers.

The Ontario Federation of Teachers said there were staff shortages before the pandemic in parts of the province and in certain subjects.

The province says that about 40 percent of school boards report that a quarter of teacher absences went unfilled last fall.

More than half of the boards reported that they hired student-teachers to replace them.