After a full month at home, Nova Scotia students will return to in-classroom learning on Monday.
Students started the Christmas holidays early when the Province changed to 17 on the last day of December 21 amid an increase in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Omicron variant.
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The new year was then supposed to start on January 6, but that has also changed. The province later announced that the first week of learning would be online.
But as of Monday, it’s back to personal tutoring and parents have mixed feelings.
Halifax parent Jennifer Arnold said she has not yet decided whether to send her two elders back to school as she has two toddlers at home.
“This is the most anxious I have been in the whole pandemic,” she said.
“They need socialization, they need their peers, they absolutely need the personal learning. But at what cost? At the expense of possibly bringing it home to our babies? ”
Arnold said although she understands how important it is for children to go to school, she would prefer Nova Scotia to use a hybrid model so families can decide what works best for them.
“I feel like I have to choose between my older kids ‘education and my younger kids’ health,” she said.
Although the Omicron variant is relatively new, school attendance during a pandemic is not. Students returned to the classroom full-time in September, and although some schools temporarily transferred to online learning, the majority did not.
Between September and December, 140 schools across the province identified COVID exposures at the school, but only seven schools closed.
Dr. Strang has said several times that school is a safe place for students and that transfer to schools is not a high risk.
The province has never released any data detailing school broadcasts, but a research project in British Columbia has been looking into it.
Between April and June 2021, they observed COVID-19 cases in schools in Vancouver and followed contact detection to see how and where the virus was transmitted. The study found that the majority of broadcasts – 90 percent – took place in households.
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School transfer was almost non-existent.
“In our contact detection section of the study, out of 229 close contacts, only three infections,” says Pascal Lavoie, a pediatrician and scientist from BC’s Children’s Hospital.
“These data tell us that schools are safe,” Lavoie said.
“To think that we would have significantly reduced the risk to children in closing schools makes little scientific sense scientifically.”
Lavoie also noted that the risk must be balanced with the impact that the closure of schools can have on children, something that is alarming pediatricians across the country.
Lavoie said they see the impact of school closures in children’s hospitals.
“In terms of mental health, in terms of physical health and those risks are too high to afford to close schools again,” he added.
On January 6, when students were supposed to return to the classroom in Nova Scotia, the Nova Scotia Pediatric Advisory Group issued an open letter stating that it supported the government’s plan to return to school and that “the risks to children and adolescents from providing in-class learning outweigh the current risks associated with COVID. ”
Teachers’ union has doubts
While parents like Arnold are trying to decide whether they are comfortable sending their children back to school or not, the president of the Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union said he had “serious doubts” whether schools would remain open until the end of the week.
Paul Wozney says he believes the government has “oversold” its plan to help schools stay open, as the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is still sweeping through the province.
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Wozney said schools had to be closed earlier than expected before the holiday break when staff levels could not be maintained with daily fall numbers for COVID-19 being much lower than it is now.
He said the province should be careful and continue with distance education until the number of cases is more manageable as has been done in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Education Minister Becky Druhan told reporters on Thursday after a cabinet meeting that plans were in place to respond to whatever operational challenges arose. Druhan says this includes allocating administrative staff from school districts to the classroom in the event of teacher shortages due to illness or the need to isolate oneself.
No more contact tracing in schools
Although the province is currently facing a shortage of speed tests, the prime minister announced on Friday that he will distribute some 25,000 tests to the nearly 400 schools across the province.
The tests should be used for students and staff who arrive at school with symptoms or develop symptoms while at school.
While the province in previous waves notified parents when schools had an exposure, they took the exposure list offline and announced that they would no longer continue with contact detection in schools.
Students will be advised to wear three-layer cloth masks, with one mask being handed out to all students when they return to school.
– With files from The Canadian Press
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