Students in Ontario will have to keep their masks on when they return to classrooms in September, the Ford government said in a long-awaited back-to-school plan released Tuesday, but neither they nor staff will be required to get a COVID-19 vaccine to attend.
More than two million school-aged children and youth in the province have learned from home since April, straining the living and working conditions of families who may not be able to work from home or have the space to accommodate everyone being at home.
Premier Doug Ford has said he won’t enforce mandatory vaccination on anyone in the province, but there have been growing calls for stricter rules in health care and education. No vaccine has yet been approved for children younger than 12.
“Doug Ford is abandoning our children, parents and education workers,” Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca said in a statement, noting his party had bucked the government and Opposition NDP in calling for mandated jabs for those front-line workers.
The provincial NDP said the province should require unvaccinated staff to take rapid COVID-19 tests, which have been used in long-term care homes and various essential workplaces but do not feature in the government’s education plan.
The plan says students will be separated into cohorts for their classes and kept in that group as much as possible, such as on the school bus, where masks will stay on.
Extracurricular activities, including indoor choir practice, will be permitted in areas with adequate ventilation. Masking will be encouraged but not required if cohorts can be kept apart.
Inter-school sports will be allowed again, but high-contact physical activities are only allowed to take place outdoors, the province said.
Masking won’t be required outdoors, but distancing should be encouraged as much as possible both inside and outside, it said. Students may only remove their masks temporarily when engaging in low-contact physical activity and when eating.
The government also said schools are expected to optimize ventilation indoors and support outdoor instruction wherever possible.
School boards must continue to provide a remote learning option for the whole of the next school year, the government has previously said, and in the new policy document made clear that flexibility would be required of boards and students who choose in-person learning.
“For the fall semester, school boards have been instructed to timetable students with no more than two courses at a time in order to preserve the option of reverting to more restrictive measures, if needed.
The plan said its section on management of COVID-19 is still to come.
