A disconnect between the provinces assurances of smaller in-person class sizes and the reality playing out in Ontarios classrooms has left parents surprised and doctors worried.

As thousands of students return to schools this week in the age of COVID-19, some parents expecting smaller classes were shocked to learn their children are in classes roughly the same size or larger than usual.

I think theres a huge disconnect between the messaging coming from the government and the reality that parents are experiencing, said parent Laura Boudreau, who was initially told last Friday that her five-year-old son, Miller, a student at Howard Junior Public School near Roncesvalles Ave. and Bloor St. W., would be in a senior kindergarten class of 15 students.

Then, on Monday night the day before school started Boudreau and her husband Ian received an email from the school with final classroom allocations and were stunned to see that Miller would be in a kindergarten class with a total of 29 students.

Experts from the Hospital for Sick Children have said keeping classroom numbers low enough to enable physical distancing is key to curbing transmission of COVID-19 in schools.

I was beside myself. I didnt know what to do. We ran through all the options we could think of: should he stay home? Should he go to school? Can we go to private school? Should we have a learning pause? said Boudreau, who works for a national literacy organization. Boudreaus older son, Tobin, is going into Grade 2 at Howard in a class of 18 students.

Were playing pandemic roulette with our children. Everyday I give Miller a bright smile and send him off to school and I come home all day to work at home and worry, she said.

For now, Miller will continue to go to school while Boudreau and her husband advocate in any way they can to help see Millers class size reduced.

Reports from parents of higher class sizes echo what some teachers across the province have been already saying. At the same time, school boards in larger urban areas have been working to bring high school classes to about 15 students.

Carlene Jackson, interim director of the Toronto Distric School Board, said parents opting to move kids to online learning has affected staffing, but now that final decisions are in, boards can allocate teachers as needed.

She said any schools with larger class sizes will be given extra teachers to bring numbers down.

Both the TDSB and Toronto Catholic District School Board are putting extra staff in schools in the areas of the city hardest hit by COVID-19.

Research has shown that young children seem less likely to exhibit severe symptoms of COVID-19 and may also be less likely to spread the disease. What parents and medical experts fear, however, is that children may contract the virus and spread it to their families and teachers, resulting in further community transmission. And for older adults, the risk for developing severe illness due to COVID-19 increases.

A spokesperson for the ministry of education said in an email that school boards are responsible for making class organization decisions at the local level. As such, individual school boards may have different policies regarding the number of classes needed and how to organize them, said spokesperson Ingrid Anderson.

The province has given boards funding to hire extra teachers, as has the federal government, and also allowed boards to dip into their reserves to fund additional staff. However, boards have said the money is inadequate to have any real impact on class size, and Jackson said Tuesday that its nowhere near enough to fund classes of 15 kids.

Reorganization that typically takes place in early October when enrolment numbers are finalized is happening now on a large scale, particularly with more students opting for online education. Some school boards delayed the start of in-person classes and the TDSB cited rising enrolment numbers on Monday when it announced it was delaying the start of online classes until Sept. 22. In less than a week we have gone from approximately 66,000 students to more than 72,000 students in the Virtual School resulting in the addition of more than 200 virtual classrooms all requiring a teacher, Jackson said in a statement Monday.

Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, said that school boards were wise to delay the start of school by a week to provide more runway for planning, but are still left with an insufficient amount of teachers.

He said the province should have ensured there was an excess of teachers this fall to give school boards wiggle room no matter how many students signed up for in-class or online learning.

They should have said were going to commit to X number of teachers because were expecting a large number of students to go online, he said. Were going to have some inefficiencies and some classes that are smaller than they ought to be, but because of that were not going to have any classes that are bigger, he said. Instead, theyve done it the other way around. Theyve made sure no classes are too small by clawing back teachers. So if theres going to be a mistake, the mistake is on the wrong side. So theyre not erring on the side of caution, theyre erring on the side of danger.

While schools reorganize classes within the first few weeks of school every year as they shore up enrolment, Furness said the sooner larger classes can be split into smaller ones, the better.

Class sizes have to be the single biggest issue and concern in Halton, added Trustee Tracey Ehl Harrison, who represents Oakville wards.

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Stuart Miller, Haltons director of education, concurred, saying class size is on the minds of parents across the province, and noted Ontarios four main teachers unions have appealed to the labour board because of it.

In Durham Region, the public board is adding about 130 classroom staff in elementary schools, and will be adding educators to high schools because of enrolment. Full-day kindergarten classrooms there are about 21 students on average, with Grades 1 through 3 sitting at 19. From Grades 4 to 8, classes grow to about 23 kids.

In the Halton District School Board, Chair Andrea Grebenc said in-person class sizes have been lowered by hiring extra staff, and that the board targeted kindergarten in particular because of concerns about larger numbers.

During a recent board meeting, Debra McFadden, Haltons executive officer of human resources, told trustees that some 24 teachers and 13 early childhood educators will be added to kindergarten classes.

As a result, classes that had averaged 29 students now average 20. In the primary grades, the board has 450 classes of students in Grades 1 through 3 where the usual cap of 20 is down to 18.5. Even in Grades 4 to 8, where boards have struggled to get numbers down, the average is down from 24.5 to 22.6. No class has more than 27 students, McFadden added, and about 50 classes out of a total 809 have 25 or 26 kids.

We have built classes with a view to keeping them as small as possible and weve been largely successful, she said.

Grace Soares-Sabino said she was surprised to find out her older son, Christian, 12, would be going into a Grade 8 class with 28 students at DArcy McGee Catholic School near Oakwood Ave. and Vaughan Rd. (Her younger son, Tyler, 6, is going into a Grade 1 class of 18 students).

Initially we were told that classes were going to be smaller but then when they started collapsing classes, we lost teachers at our school, said Soares-Sabino, who says she first became concerned when she noticed that many teachers who had been at DArcy McGee for a long time werent on the list of classes sent out by her principal.

Soares-Sabino, who has been working from home since March, says while she believes her boys need to interact with their friends and teachers in person for their mental health, I feel like as a parent Im throwing them into a lions den.

When I drop them off tomorrow, all I will do is be crying because I will be afraid for what Ive potentially put my children into, she said.

Jessica Dee Humphreys, whose 11-year-old son Finn is in a Grade 7 gifted class at King Edward Public School in downtown Toronto, said she recently received a photo from Finns teacher showing how students were sitting three to a desk with tape marking out each position. She says the class enrolment is at the cap of 25, a level it has never reached before.

Its heartbreaking, she said, adding that returning Finn back to school is like sending him into the coal mines.

Its something like you would look back in history and say, well I would never do that to my kid and yet Im doing it today, she said.

Correction Sept. 17, 2020: This article was edited from a previous version to remove incorrect information provided by a parent about the size of a Grade 4 class at Thorncliffe Park Public School. In fact, there are 20 students in the class, not 30.

With files from Canadian Press

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Were playing pandemic roulette with our children. After all the provinces promises, parents shocked to see some class sizes are bigger than ever -...