By Lucy Lau
Should all students be screened before they enter schools? What’s the best way to prevent community infection during lunch? And how does one minimize the risk of a 3 p.m. dismissal when hundreds of students typically stream into the school parking lot to meet their parents?
These were just some of the questions asked by educators at a recent virtual town hall in the lead-up to back to school. There, principals from East Toronto schools gathered — or rather, logged into Zoom — to receive medical expertise and guidance surrounding the safe reopening of schools from infectious disease physicians and family doctors at Michael Garron Hospital (MGH) and the East Toronto Family Practice Network (EasT-FPN).
During these weekly meetings, principals from more than 70 schools in MGH’s catchment area have the opportunity to pose questions directly to infectious disease experts which are then answered in real-time.
By responding to questions like “Is it safe for children to participate in singing games while wearing masks?” and “How can we ensure the safety of students while they’re playing instruments in music class?”, MGH and EasT-FPN physicians aim to help educators apply safety guidelines from school boards and government bodies in a way that’s effective and makes sense in their local settings.
The town halls are one part of a proactive, community-based approach to back-to-school planning that involves MGH and EasT-FPN working directly with schools in East Toronto as they prepare to welcome students back into classrooms amid the pandemic.
“This partnership is valuable because MGH and EasT-FPN know our community,” says Jeffrey Crane, principal of Thorncliffe Park Public School, the largest elementary school in Canada, and a participant in MGH’s and EasT-FPN’s virtual town halls.
“They know the students, the parents; they know the challenges related to living in a high-density area like Thorncliffe Park during a pandemic. So they’re able to help us navigate the different safety directives we’ve received.”
Jeffrey says Thorncliffe Park Public School has “always had a close relationship” with both MGH and EasT-FPN physicians, who help staff a paediatric clinic that launched within the school two years ago. He says the support the school is now receiving from these healthcare organizations, both of which are members of East Toronto Health Partners (ETHP), is critical.
“There is tremendous anxiety from our staff about ensuring a safe back to school,” Jeffrey says. “So it brings us a lot of comfort to know we have a direct line of contact to these physicians and infectious disease experts and that we’re able to ask questions and receive guidance when we need it.”
Dr. Janine McCready, an infectious diseases physician at MGH who is co-leading the community-based back-to-school support initiative, remembers that stress and anxiety well. They were feelings she and her colleagues at MGH regularly experienced during the first few months of the pandemic when much about COVID-19 was unknown.
Drawing from their success in proactively supporting long-term care (LTC) homes during the pandemic, MGH’s infection prevention and control (IPAC) team now want to pass on their knowledge to educators in East Toronto so together, they can help facilitate a safe return to classrooms for students, teachers, school support staff and families.
“Schools aren’t typically under the realm of hospitals,” Dr. McCready says, “but because our community is so integrated, this was a priority. We felt compelled to reach out to these schools and ‘wrap our arms around them,’ so to speak, so we can support them in any way we can.”
For Dr. Karen Chu, a family physician at EasT-FPN, leading a community-based initiative of this scale is part of EasT-FPN’s mandate of ensuring the health and safety of East Toronto.
She says she and other family physicians in the area have been fielding questions from teachers, students and families surrounding a safe return to school for months. As a result, she wanted to find a way where she and her colleagues could help deliver answers and clarify the onslaught of information that schools were receiving.
“We recognized there were questions and worries on how to implement safety guidelines related to going back to school and wanted to help relieve some of this stress by sharing the knowledge we’ve learned through our experience providing care during the pandemic since March,” Dr. Chu says.
In addition to the ongoing town halls, MGH’s and EasT-FPN’s community-based back-to-school support plan involves pairing local school principals with family physicians. These physicians will serve as school liaisons to connect high-risk schools with primary care, IPAC support and local community health centres while helping to interpret health and safety guidelines in a local setting.
“We want to be able to continue building relationships with these schools so when they do have questions or if COVID-19 cases arise, we can support and empower them with the right tools and information,” Dr. Chu says.
The approach will also see MGH and EasT-FPN monitoring positive COVID-19 cases in East Toronto communities as schools reopen. The partners will launch mobile COVID-19 testing sites for local neighbourhoods and school communities where a need is demonstrated.
This builds on the success of MGH’s and its community partners’ pop-up COVID-19 testing sites, which ran throughout East Toronto this summer.
Dr. McCready says ensuring safe classroom learning is going to be “a work in progress” but she believes that, by keeping community transmission rates low and encouraging the continued compliance to health and safety measures like physical distancing and mask wearing, a safe return to schools can be achieved.
“If I didn’t think it was possible to get kids back to school safely, I wouldn’t be as engaged with this work as I am,” she says.
Dr. McCready says she is prepared to continue sharing her expertise with East Toronto principals so educators can reach a place where they feel safe and comfortable and can focus their efforts on teaching.
Principals like Jeffrey, meanwhile, will continue asking questions — and seeking reliable medical advice and guidance — as long as physicians and infectious disease experts like Dr. McCready and Dr. Chu are available.
“Having such direct, accessible support from our community health leaders during the pandemic is fantastic,” he says. “All schools should have something like this.”