by Selena Ross and Caroline van Vlaardingen, CTV Montreal
A class of Grade 7 students at a private school on the South Shore have already been sent home, on their first day back, because one of their parents has COVID-19 — though Quebec authorities now say that response was overkill.
Parents of 35 kids at Collège Français Annexe Secondaire Longueuil were called to come pick up their children on Thursday, only a couple of hours after dropping them off, a school spokesperson told CTV.
The father of one of the children in the class had been tested for COVID-19, but the school wasn’t told of this, said spokesperson Marco Parent.
Administrators were only informed on Thursday when the man got his positive results, he said.
The students had only been back in school for a couple of hours at that point, at around 10 a.m. or 10:30 this morning. As soon as the school found out, it took the students out of class and alerted their parents, Parent said.
Until the kids were picked up the school made sure no other students came near them.
Getting further instructions proved to be more difficult. Parent said the school called the Federation of Private Schools and the Ministry of Education and they were told to reach out to Public Health.
After doing so repeatedly, he said at 3:30 p.m. that they still hadn’t heard back.
In the meantime, the school stuck with its decision to send home the whole class to be “better safe than sorry,” Parent said.
In a press conference around the same time, Education Minister Jean-François Roberge said the school went overboard by sending home the whole class.
Roberge says that overall, things went well with the first day back at school for many kids (in Montreal, students at many private schools and those in the public French system went back today. The EMSB’s first day is Monday).
Roberge said that the College Francais’s reaction involved a lot of attention to precaution and prevention, which he praised, but he said that in the end the school didn’t need to send all the kids in the class home.
According to health rules, Roberge said, the school only needed to isolate the child of the infected parent and to advise public health authorities.
Then, he said, the parents of kids in that child’s “bubble” – or others who had come into contact with that child – would be advised on whether they should be tested.
School administrators told media that they finally heard from public health authorities around 4 p.m. and were told that all the children in the class can and should be back in school tomorrow, except for the child of the infected man.
Under the province’s health rules for schools, each class is now considered a “bubble” where all of its students are considered to be in close contact with each other.
The previous version of the plan had each class broken up into smaller groups of up to six students, who would be kept distant from the other groups within the class, but that idea was abandoned.
When asked about the frustration of parents who were called to pick up their kids almost immediately, Roberge repeated that the protocol is to put the child who had direct contact with the infect person in isolation, and to let public health handle contact tracing.