SIMS: Lord Elgin school closure illustrates ripple effect of continuing COVID cases

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One of the happiest non-pandemic stories The Free Press published last year was how Lord Elgin elementary school’s playground got its groove back.

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For five years, the kids who attend the school and live in economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods in north London had nothing but mud in the school yard after their playground equipment was taken down for safety reasons.

It cost about $65,000 for new playground equipment, none of it covered by the school board. The school community — with 95 per cent of it students from the low-income Boullee and Huron Heights neighbourhoods — had raised only about $9,000 of the cost after years of carnivals and bake sales.

Dr. Karen Geukers, the sister of a Lord Elgin teacher, started an online fundraising effort and asked The Free Press to tell the rest of the city about the campaign. Donations flowed in. The $60,000 raised meant Lord Elgin had a playground in time for school last year.

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But, just a month into this school year, the playground will be quiet during recesses for at least the next week.

Lord Elgin has been temporarily closed after 11 cases of COVID-19 showed up at the school, affecting six classrooms. The Middlesex-London Health Unit declared an outbreak last weekend, a move made only when it suspects at least one case of transmission within a school.

The Thames Valley District school board — which had its hands full at Tuesday night’s board meeting with a loud American-style protest of anti-vaxxers — decided to close the school Wednesday because a number of the staff had to go into quarantine, making it impossible to operate classes properly.

“It’s not a situation where the outbreak has become so dangerous from a public health perspective that the school has to be closed,” said medical officer of health Chris Mackie, who emphasized there is no evidence of any infection control issues at the school.

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“What’s happened in Lord Elgin is we have a number of cases who live in a fairly closely packed area, and have a lot of mixing outside of the school environment, and that outside-of-school mixing is likely what’s driving cases here.”

Mackie has maintained throughout the pandemic that schools are safe and it’s the unrestricted activities outside of school that are the problem. After such a fractured school year in 2020-21, keeping schools open is essential for the children’s mental health, he says.

The Delta variant of COVID-19 is far more contagious, and Mackie said it isn’t a surprise that more cases are showing up in schools.

But let’s think about the ramifications for a low-income school community like Lord Elgin’s. These aren’t kids who are ferried off by their parents to hockey or basketball or ballet after classes. Lots of the families live in subsidized housing and struggle to get enough food to eat.

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The school is a hub for them — one of the reasons why the playground reopening was met with such joy. Closing the school also means a stop to afterschool sports and clubs. It means struggling families have to find a way to get their kids connected online. It means any gains made by the children who finally got to return to class and be with friends are on hold.

Mackie wasn’t clear whether the Lord Elgin neighbourhood was one of the “pockets of unvaccinated” that the health unit has wanted to target. He said a database is in the works that would cross-reference vaccination records and identify which schools have low vaccination rates.

But it would stand to reason that there will be barriers for people who are poor or are new Canadians who don’t speak English as a first language. The situation is serious enough that the health unit was organizing a testing clinic at the school Wednesday evening and Mackie said they will get a pop-up vaccination clinic in the neighbourhood in the coming days.

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I’m sure that won’t go over well with the small mob that showed up outside a school board meeting Tuesday to demonstrate and intimidate. London’s Mayor Ed Holder said despite all their “huffing and puffing” about an issue that is leaving them behind “on a road to anonymity and ridiculousness,” vaccination rates are increasing.

“More people today in London are going to get their first shots than were in this modest protest last night,” Holder said.

I hope he’s right. The only way Lord Elgin, and indeed the rest of us, can get our groove back is to get our shots.

jsims@postmedia.com

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