A local teachers' union president is applauding the Ontario government's announcement that secondary schools can return to regular semesters as of February.
Erin Roy, President of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation District 9, says they've been asking for the change for a number of reasons.
Roy says staff and students are looking forward to some normalcy.
"I'm glad that that is being announced as long as our health unit is on board with it, then I'm glad to hear that," she says. "I think that many of my members were clinging to the hope that we could get back to something like that midway through the year."
Numerous school boards have requested the move away from "modified semesters," which saw students take four courses each term, alternating which two classes they had each week.
Roy says the current schedule has been hard on everyone.
"The schedule we're doing right now is taxing on the staff as well as the students. They take two classes in a week and then they switch completely over to another set of classes following week," she says. "So have math, and then they leave math for a week to do English in the following week, but then they come back to math the week after that. So it's chunking out the work."
The current system allows for easier cohorting to meet COVID-19 restrictions, but students and parents have complained that the three-hour classes make it hard to absorb and retain information.
Roy agrees that the length of classes has proved to be an issue.
"The 150 minute classes is very long. It's hard for anyone to pay attention for that amount of time on one specific area," she says. "So I think people will be happy to see that we're moving back towards pre-pandemic normalcy classes."
The government also says that starting in January, if not earlier, all elementary school-wide assemblies are to be held virtually.
Lunches and breaks in elementary schools will be restricted to classroom cohorts indoors when distancing between cohorts can't be maintained.
With files from Rusty Thomson and The Canadian Press