TORONTO – The students returned to the classrooms on Wednesday but a large number of teachers remained at home. It is an emergency in the school boards of the GTA that are rushing to hire substitutes to replace absent teachers due to, they say, “the high number of infections or contacts with people infected with Covid-19”. 

But the absenteeism of teachers that is totally attributed to Covid in reality could also be partly due to the fact that they have not respected the protocol for Covid-19. The Corriere Canadese has sent emails about this to both the Executive Officer (A), Government, Public & Community Relations of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) Ryan Bird and the Chief of Communication of the Toronto District School Board (TCDSB) Shazia Vlahos without obtaining, until the moment we go to press, any response.

At the Toronto District School Board, the absences of 3,722 faculty and support teachers have caused quite a few problems. On average, the daily absence of staff is about 3,119 employees. The difficulty in finding substitutes for the open classes was enormous and about 60% of the posts remained vacant. In cases where student supervision was not necessary, strategies such as employing other staff in the school, including non-teaching staff members, were used.

The Toronto Catholic District School Board reported a lack of 434 elementary teachers and 215 high school teachers: the daily absence rate was 11%.

The situation was no different in the other GTA school boards that had to run for cover in a hurry to ensure at least the presence of a substitute or someone able to supervise the children.

The Durham Catholic Board reported that it had managed to fill in part the gap of 154 of its 1,443 teachers with 45 teachers and 67 of the 295 support staff members with 39 substitutes.

Similar situation in the schools of the Catholic board of Hamilton-Wentworth while the public school board of Hamilton managed to cope with 90% of the vacancies with substitutes.

The reopening of schools with an associated shortage of teachers had already been foreseen by many provveditorati. Patrick Daly, president of the Ontario Catholic School Trustees’ Association, said that before children returned to the classroom in presence, there was “deep concern among Catholic school boards regarding the level of absences due to illness or isolation of staff who came into contact with infected people.”

Meanwhile, many parents have expressed concern about the cloth masks provided by the Ford government to students who have returned to school: according to them, these are not the right size. The masks can also be washed only 20 times. The government, for its part, declares that all the school boards have received masks of two sizes and that other stocks of various sizes are on the way.