Why social distancing in Ontario will soon be dead: The @fordnation back to school plan is pulling the trigger. Cuts to education ensured large class sizes & overcrowded classrooms, making social distancing impossibile. This has not been addressed during #SafeSeptemberON

With average class sizes in the upper 20s, things already seem risky. But remember: classes will be made up of students with siblings in other classes/schools, meaning that a child's cohort won't just be the classes they are in, but the footprint of their classmate's families.

Using class sizes of 28, if you have 2 kids in primary, your family cohort becomes 28+28. But wait. The majority of the kids in each of your kids' cohorts are going to have siblings in different classes (and perhaps schools). The # jumps.

Each kid in your kids' classes will have their own family footprint. So if a classmate is 1 of 2 siblings, that's a footprint of additional 28 per sibling (again using the smaller primary cohort number). Now multiply that by the number of combined siblings in your kids' class.

Some napkin math: say 20 kids in each of your elementary kid's classes of 28 have 1 sibling each in different classes. That's an additional footprint of 28 per sibling student (again, if all elementary). That's your family's 56+your cohort's footprint: 56+(20+20)x28=1,176.

Now, each of those classmate's siblings will be in class with classmates who ALSO have siblings, meaning that... well... we start getting into exponentials here. And exponentials, my friends, is exactly what we want to eliminate when we try to #FlattenTheCurve

And that's not counting EAs, language teachers, reading assistants, etc. Nor does it address secondary students who have multiple different classes with different teachers/educators. Not that it matters much once you get into exponentials.

@fordnation currently mandates social bubbles of ≤ 10 without social distancing. Anyone who has spent any time in our overcrowded classrooms knows that social distancing is simply impossible. So they are sending kids/teachers into exponential footprints of 1000s & 1000s.

While kids ARE less likely to develop Covid, they effectively spread it. With each family in a footprint with 1000s of other families, social distancing is effectively over, representing a massive roll of the dice for @fordnation #SafeSeptemberON and all the people of Ontario.

Please reach out to your MPP, @fordnation, and @Sflecce to let them know that smaller class sizes, allowing for true social distancing, is needed in order to address the current global Covid-19 pandemic. The decision to end social distancing is in their hands. #SafeSeptemberON

In the case of #ptbo @kprschools schools, that would be @DaveSmithPtbo

Dave, do you have anything to add?