With the province announcing the suspension on the reporting of COVID-19 cases in schools, the Upper Grand District School Board is working towards keeping the public informed by installing a reporting system on how classes are being affected.
The system, which is currently in development, will be based around a system of reporting absences from classrooms.
“The staff presented on Tuesday, and what we are doing is the staff are developing a bit of a pilot on school absence data collection,” said UGDSB Board Chair Linda Busuttil. “Because we don’t have positive COVID cases to report to public health.”
With the current situation and return to schools extremely fluid at the moment, Busuttil said the intention will have this pilot project will be available in every school.
“We don’t know what it looks like yet, we’re working on this, they’re working towards having this in place before the return to in-person learning,” said Busuttil. “I think we’re all kind of pulling together the pieces. I do want to give credit to our staff, our leadership team because they get this. Parents and staff want to have access to information so they can understand what’s happening in their community, so they’re putting together this pilot to fill in the information gap.”
Heather Loney, spokesperson for the UGDSB, said in an email: “The UGDSB recognizes the importance of continuing to inform our communities about absences. UGDSB staff are working on developing an interim process for reporting absences and will communicate more on this when it is finalized. As announced by the province last week, the Ministry of Education is suspending the reporting of positive cases. The province said that further information will be shared shortly with school boards on reporting expectations of absences and school closures due to COVID-19.
"Additionally, the role of Public Health is changing. COVID-19 testing and outbreak management is changing to focus provincial resources on the highest risk settings (e.g. hospitals long-term care homes, etc.). Staff and student contact tracing in schools will no longer be a part of the process and COVID-19 cases will not routinely be reported to schools. So in general, schools and the school board will not be informed by Public Health when there is a positive case."
Ali Wilson, communications officer at the Wellington Catholic District School Board said the ministry indicated in their Dec. 30 memo, and the board heard as recently as today, that further information will be shared with school boards on reporting expectations of absences in schools due to COVID-19.
"We are reviewing different models for this and will be updating our community after we have received the additional guidance from the ministry."
