Elementary school students in Ontario will not be returning to school on Monday as planned.
The province’s top Doctors announced Thursday that students will continue remote learning and return to in class learning on January 25th. That is the same day secondary school students are scheduled to return to class.
Chatham-Kent’s Chief Medical Officer says while he believes the risk of transmission in our local schools remain low, keeping kids at home avoids the continuous opening and closing of classrooms.
“If there were large numbers of cases in a community, then the family exposure and contact exposure means that large numbers of cohorts in schools will likely need to be isolated.”
Provincial officials were waiting to see the post-Christmas numbers before making a decision. Yesterday, Ontario recorded a record number of new cases and deaths and the positive rate tripled among elementary students over the past month.
“It gets to a point where there’s so much going on, the wisdom may be to delay students going back until we see the overall Ontario numbers start to flatten and hopefully dip,” Dr. Colby says.
