Mandate vaccines for in-person high school

Province must do more to ensure a safe return to the full tapestry of experiences offered

Lately, Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government has touted its planned return to in-person learning this September.

While these broad statements may seem a balm to stressed parents, they ignore the fact that for most of the province’s high school students, two-thirds of this past year was conducted in-person — albeit cohorted and operating under the so-called “hybrid” model.

In most cases, this meant that students attended school in-person part of the time, and studied from home when the alternate cohort was in school. For teachers, however, full-time in-person teaching was the reality for much of the year. The curriculum survived and students learned “live,” but many were unable to educationally thrive.

Then, the final months of provincewide closures meant that most high schoolers completed entire courses online. Not only did they never meet their classmates or teachers, but many disengaged completely from any sort of educational regularity: logging in intermittently, doing assignments in the wee hours, just getting by. Surviving, not thriving. Surely, a return to in-person learning is the sort of achievable goal that we need right now.

Merely trumpeting a return to inperson learning isn’t enough, though. The bare-bones educational environment of this past year is untenable in the long term — even if students are permitted to return, uncohorted, to daily in-person classes.

In-person classes alone, devoid of the extracurricular, artistic, athletic and social outlets that a rich and vibrant educational system provides, cannot meet the needs of students returning from a mentally and emotionally draining 18 months of pandemic disruptions.

The Progressive Conservatives must do more to ensure a safe return to the full tapestry of experiences offered in high schools, and this can only be done with vaccinations as a prerequisite to secondary students’ return to the in-person classroom. Other vaccinations are already required for school attendance, and to ignore this fact by pandering to the privacy hawks and libertarian base that makes up a large portion of the PC Party voting coalition is harmful and inappropriate.

A return to the things that students value — like sports, music, clubs, student councils, intramurals, drama productions and school dances — will surely require some proof of vaccination due to the perceived, though perhaps overstated, elevated risk-level that comes with those activities. However, to download monitoring to already overstressed teachers, to have teachers checking statuses and turning away the unvaccinated, is patently unfair.

We now have an online school system in every board. These fully remote school systems were used this past year to accommodate students who were uncomfortable with attending in-person classes for any variety of reasons. However, this system could also be easily utilized to educate the unvaccinated. If, as advertised, these full-remote schools are offering a complete curriculum, then the answer is simple: if you wish to attend high school in-person, get a vaccine. If you are unwilling to do so, we won’t deny your right to an Ontario education, but that education will be received from one of the online schools that now exist.

At the very least, the province needs to clarify exactly what the vaccination requirements will be for a full and complete restart of the school system, not merely a return to in-person learning. School boards should be informing parents and students now as to just how their vaccination status will affect their participation in all aspects of school life, so that they are making informed decisions over the summer months.

Faced with these types of choices, we may just see increased uptake in vaccinations among the 12-18-yearold demographic that has become increasingly concerning to both health officials and politicians. To jeopardize a return to the deep and comprehensive educational experience students need — in the defence of some false notion of freedom, privacy, or, more cynically, to protect votes in an election year — is not only disingenuous but disgraceful.