Collaboration is the name of the game when it comes to making sure schools are safe for kids come September.
Both the St Clair Catholic and Lambton Kent District School Boards have released detailed plans on a return to school, following guidelines from the Ministry of Education.
Chatham-Kent’s Medical officer of Health Dr David Colby says the geographic makeup of our local boards complicates matters somewhat.
“How can you put something like that into local control when it has such wide-spread implications across the province? I think the role of local public health will be to assist with interpretation of rules that are broadly applied across the province,” Colby says. “There’s always some questions that remain when a set of criteria is issued and that’s where local public health will come in, and we will do this in lock-step with our colleagues in Sarnia-Lambton.”
Colby says everyone had hoped the progression of COVID-19 would be a little more under control by this point, so keeping the community, and kids in particular, safe is a constantly evolving situation.
“My impression is that everyone was hoping that by now the numbers would be way, way down and we would have less anxiety about sending kids back to school,” Colby says. “The situation is in flux.”