Now is the time for parents to make a concrete decision about whether or not to send their children back to school in September.
That's the message coming from TDSB chair Robin Pilkey, who joined Moore in the Morning on Monday.
"Unfortunately at some point we need to draw a line in the sand and start saying 'OK this is how many kids we're going to have come back' and we need to plan accordingly based on that information. We can't continue to wonder," Pilkey said. "I know that people may change their mind..."
But Pilkey says it's not just as simple as changing your mind halfway through the year. This survey is open until Aug. 17, and Pilkey says that's when the board will have a better idea of how many of the 246,000 TDSB students will be coming back.
"We do need to start saying 'How many teachers are we going to need? Where are we going to need them? How big will the classes be?'," Pilkey says. "We do need to do this at some point and... school starts on September 8, we need to do this now."
Pilkey says with no funding promise from the province, they aren't planning for smaller cohorts of students unless fewer students come back to in-class learning.
FULL INTERVIEW: TDSB Chair Robin Pilkey on Moore in the Morning