Students in Ottawa will be allowed to return to in-person classes on Monday, Feb. 1, according to an announcement Thursday from Ontario’s education minister.
But while the city’s top doctor welcomes the reopening of classrooms, she is cautioning parents and other residents about the dangers of relaxing other COVID-19 precautions.
Ottawa Public Health is among four health units across the province allowed to resume in-person schooling next week, joining a slew of other regions where classrooms reopened earlier this week.
The release from the office of Education Minister Stephen Lecce confirms schools in the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, the Ottawa Catholic School Board, le Conseil des écoles publiques de l’Est de l’Ontario (CEPEO) and le Conseil scolaire de district catholique du Centre-Est de l’Ontario will all be allowed to resume in-person schooling on Monday.
Schools in the Eastern Ontario Health Unit are also among those allowed to open, as are those under the authority of Southwestern Public Health and the Middlesex-London Health Unit.
The announcement comes after Dr. Vera Etches, Ottawa’s medical officer of health, said she expressed her confidence about the city’s ability to reopen schools safely in a phone call with Lecce on Tuesday.
Ottawa, which has been seeing a general decline in the levels of COVID-19 in the city over the past few weeks, was left out of last week’s announcement detailing which boards could reopen for in-person schooling.
Schools in Ottawa have operated via remote learning only since the start of the year amid provincewide lockdown orders aimed at curbing the spread of the novel coronavirus in Ontario.
Etches said in a statement Thursday that Ottawa Public Health has alerted its testing partners to increase capacity geared towards children ahead of the return to classrooms.
She also said OPH is looking at using rapid testing technologies to quickly gauge the scale of a possible coronavirus outbreak in a school setting.
Etches reiterated in her statement that reopening schools is not a signal to relax COVID-19 precautions in other parts of daily life, and stressed that the return to in-person schooling is “essential” to the well-being of kids.
“Now more than ever, we need to continue to reduce transmission in the community. This includes ensuring children do not come into contact with other children outside of the school setting, even for organized activities such as sports, clubs or socializing. Gatherings before and after school, with close contact between students without masks, are a key blind spot to address,” she said.
“In other words, this is still ‘stay at home’ except for students to participate in school – an essential service for them.”
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