Students and teachers in Ontario will return to classrooms as scheduled Monday, Global News learns.
Sources say that all Ontario schoolchildren, including elementary and middle school students, will return to school on Monday.
Read more:
Ontario Moves Schools To Online Learning, Bans Indoor Meals, Issues New Capacity Restrictions Over COVID
Last week, Ontario Prime Minister Doug Ford said on Monday, January 17, 2021 that the goal was to reopen schools after they were temporarily closed in an attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19.
The province said that as students and teachers turned to online learning, officials would work to implement fit-tested N95 respirators for education and childcare staff, high-quality three-layer fabric masks for students, and filters. Additional HEPA for classrooms.
The provincial government also said there would also be new assessment requirements, new time-limited cohort protocols, and $ 1.6 billion in new resources for school boards.
In addition, on Saturday, the provincial government announced that it had added additional vaccination clinics in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area to help speed up the vaccination of early care and education personnel.
In an email to Global News Monday night, Ryan Bird, a spokesman for the Toronto District School Board, said the board had received more than 600,000 N95 masks that had not been tested and distributed to schools.
Additionally, the email stated that the assessment tool that students and staff must complete each day was updated and the board now has more than 16,000 HEPA filters, with nearly 300 more on the way.
According to Bird, there are HEPA filters in all occupied classrooms and there have also been additional vaccine clinics for school staff to receive their booster doses.
Read more:
Toronto to Hold COVID-19 Vaccine Clinics for Teachers and Students as Cases Rise
The news comes as Ontario reported 9,706 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday.
However, officials caution that daily case counts may now be an underestimate of how widely the virus is spreading in the province now that stricter testing rules have been put in place.
The latest provincial data says 2,467 people across Ontario are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. This marks a 48 percent increase over the numbers reported on Sunday.
Of those people, 248 are receiving treatment in an intensive care unit.
To date, 54,734 children ages 5 to 11 have contracted COVID-19 in Ontario, while the province has reported 80,256 cases of the virus in people ages 12 to 19.
As of Monday, a total of nine COVID-19-related deaths have been reported in Ontario residents under the age of 19 since the pandemic began.
–This is breaking news, more to come …
– with a file from Aaron D’Andrea of Global News
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