I have two children, one of whom is set to start Grade 10 next month. Like many of you who have children, I’m sure you’re weighing your options when it comes to school in September.
Like most parents, it seems, we’re leaning toward having our daughter in class. And like many of you, we’ve looked at the provincial guidelines and gone over our school board’s plan for a (relatively) safe return to in-class learning.
We’ve involved our daughter in the discussion. She’s old enough, we feel, to have a say in what happens to her, particularly when there is — let’s be honest here — some risk in having a mass group of children, teachers and staff sharing the air in a single building.
It’s hard, at least for my wife and me, to come to terms with that risk, because while that risk is real, no one can actually say how high that risk is with any certainty. You can’t put a number on it; there’s no percentage here to help us, as parents, make the decision.
So, we’re doing what each and every one of us do every day: we’re weighing the relative risk against what we do know; namely, the number of positive cases we’ve seen in Greater Sudbury, the rate of infection and the severity of disease among young people, the chance of community transmission and the plans that have been put in place to keep children as safe as possible.
Clearly, we can’t keep them 100-per-cent safe. That’s just not realistic.
Just as an aside, I’m annoyed with the rhetoric of the opposition parties on this issue.
Premier Doug Ford and the Ontario Conservatives are a lot of things, but to suggest, as the NDP and Liberals have done, the government is willing to sacrifice the lives of children on the altar of political ideology is insulting, insulting to the government, insulting to the opposition and insulting to taxpayers.
Opposition parties are important. Our democracy needs them. The plurality of our democracy has given us good things, like socialized medicine. But politicizing this issue to the degree they have done is not helpful and does a disservice to all of us, but particularly to parents who are already agonizing over the decision.
The government didn’t pull the back to school plan out of thin air and it’s certainly not a perfect document, but it is a living document. And as the Ontario government (and virtually every other government, too) has done repeatedly throughout this pandemic, plans will change as new information comes to light.
Do your own reading on this, but the provincial plan was built with the involvement of various public health officials, including Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. David Williams, as well as guidelines from SickKids Hospital in Toronto.
You can read the SickKids guidelines here. Does Ontario’s plan follow it exactly? No, but it’s pretty close. I would encourage you to read it (if you have the patience) for yourself. The comparisons between the SickKids guidelines and the Ontario government plan that have been circulating on social media can give you a false impression the two are markedly different. They’re not. SickKids' guidelines are far more nuanced than those comparisons make it appear.
A clear take away from the SickKids report is the authors’ argument that the adverse health effects of keeping children home “significantly outweigh” the relatively small risk of becoming infected at school. The report also points out that in countries with low infection rates, like Canada, a return to school did not result in an appreciable spike in new cases of COVID-19.
Naturally, there is a risk that children could bring the virus home with them, but let’s not forget safety measures (limiting interactions between groups, physical distancing, hand hygiene, social circles) are already in place to minimize disease spread, and those measures have worked well.
Is COVID-19 circulating in our community? Yes. Is it raging out of control? Absolutely not.
Based on the plan from the province and having reviewed the individual plans of local school boards, I have to say, for us, the benefits outweigh the risks. Masking, regular hand hygiene and cohorting to minimize interactions work.
Am I worried? Of course. I’m a parent. I live in a constant state of worry to some degree, even though my children are older.
Could the return to school lead to a spike in cases in the community? Yes, it could. But look at what happened as Ontario moved into Stage 3 — the spike was small and manageable, despite many people acting as though the pandemic was at an end. There is no reason to think a return to school will be any different.
Now, I’m not telling you what to do. Each of us has to make a decision about what is best for our children. I’m just sharing the process we worked through at my house. It’s a process that’s still ongoing, in fact. We haven’t yet made a decision, but we’re leaning toward our daughter being in class.
Of course, we’re prepared to alter those plans as new information comes to light. That just makes good sense.
Mark Gentili is the editor of Sudbury.com.
