Now that the Toronto District School Board has approved its back to school plan, it's still going to take time before all of the details can be hammered out.
TDSB Chair Alexander Brown telling Moore in the Morning that there are still questions around how many students will be in each class, which schools will have lower class size limits, or where children will actually be learning.
"Well we have to do another registration email that has to be sent out," Brown says. "Once we have those numbers, we're going to be able to work with the local schools to figure out what the class sizes will be, and then that information will hopefully go out — I don't want to pin it down to a date because things change so much... so I'd say maybe in a week we'd have a better idea."
That final survey closes Aug. 29, and parents will again have to indicate whether or not their child will return to the physical classroom.
Until then, it won't be clear what each class size will be, although there are guidelines in place, especially for schools in high-risk COVID-19 areas:
The official back to school date is Sept. 15, but not all kids will be going back that day.
"We're going to stagger them back," Brown says. "Kids will start coming back, I don't know how yet, but they're going to stagger them back, maybe by grades. Start with the lower grades and then by the end of the week everyone's back."
Brown says it's assumed that 20 per cent of kids will stay in online learning. If all students were to come back there would be some spacing issues, and in that case the board has a list of City of Toronto places that could be utilized as classroom settings.
Again, we won't know the details on if those spaces have to be utilized until it's closer to back to school time.