Moving March break to April is the best choice for Ontario

Two weeks after Christmas, Premier Doug Ford took to the podium to announce somberly that Ontario was in a “desperate situation” with record-breaking COVID-19 numbers.

“This is the most serious situation we’ve ever been in ever, ever, since the start of this pandemic,” he said.

The virus, quite predictably, had hitched a ride on the backs of all the people who shopped, travelled and socialized over the holidays. And it was not Ontario’s first holiday-induced spike in cases.

Previously, two weeks after Thanksgiving, it was Health Minister Christine Elliott who had the task of pointing out that holiday gatherings were a factor in the then-troubling surge in COVID cases.

“The impacts of Thanksgiving,” she said, were responsible for keeping numbers stubbornly high despite the enhanced measures designed to bring them down.

Even little old Mother’s Day last May produced a virus spike in Ontario.

Given all that, it’s little surprise that Ontario announced on Thursday that March break will be postponed by a month in the hope of avoiding yet another holiday-related surge.

As Education Minister Stephen Lecce said, “We’d rather not repeat that.”

In fact, schools are only reopening next Tuesday to in-class learning in the COVID hot spots of Toronto, Peel and York regions because of that holiday spike in cases, which included, as Lecce put it, “a massive spike of transmission and positivity of our kids” while they were out of school on break.

Even less surprising than the government’s announcement is the fact that educators are not pleased about the change. They argue that everyone needs this long-scheduled break to recharge given the challenging school year.

There certainly are pros and cons to the government’s decision but, on balance, it’s the right thing to do.

Given how poorly previous holidays have gone, Ontario can only benefit from a little more time to get COVID numbers down and better understand the impact of the new, more contagious variants before two million students and their families are let loose for a week of free time.

A school break can’t help but put pressure on parents to find something, anything really, to do with their kids. The alternative is sitting at home watching TV and who hasn’t already had enough of that to last a lifetime?

At the same time, pandemic restrictions are being lessened considerably in many parts of Ontario, which only adds to the dangerous siren call to travel and seek some fun.

So the delayed break makes sense. But keeping students in school for another month, before a break now set for April 12-16, is a two-way street.

The government must ensure that schools remain safe and don’t become cesspools of virus transmission, especially given the new variants.

Ford, Elliott and Lecce have long maintained that students are safer in school than anywhere else. So far, the data supports them.

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But there are also serious questions about the province’s enhanced back-to-school measures, particularly whether students and staff will have access to the level of asymptomatic testing the government says will be provided. Lecce keeps talking about the “capacity” for 50,000 weekly tests, but as Ontarians know all too well there’s a big gap between what the province claims it can do and what actually ends up happening.

To ensure schools remain as safe will require robust screening to keep cases out of schools, comprehensive rapid testing to catch asymptomatic cases, and strong adherence to infection control practices.

Ontario’s entire school plan, included a delayed March break, is essentially the government’s promise to parents that there’s no better place for their children in a pandemic than in school. That’s a promise the Ford government must see through.