The boy’s mother wanted her son to attend school in-person. She said the boy had trouble focusing on assignments and suffered from isolation since schools closed during the early days of the pandemic last spring. He is enrolled in a French immersion program despite neither parent being bilingual. The mother argued in-person schooling would allow him to be more successful.The boy’s father, instead, wanted his child to attend virtual school.
Melanie O’Neil, the lawyer who represented the mother, said many clients have reached out to her in recent months with concerns that are rooted in personal anxieties. She said parents with different thoughts on mask-wearing, government plans or restricted visits to older relatives are unable to come to a consensus about their children.
But in the second, the same court ordered children back to school because assessing the risk of contamination in schools was the responsibility of government authorities, the judge said.In the Ontario case, Justice Himel pointed out that neither parent had an underlying medical condition that would place them at high risk if they contracted COVID-19.
William Doodnauth, a family lawyer practising in Toronto who was not part of the Ontario case, said COVID-19 has become an issue among his clients. Many couples who split up also have different parenting styles, he said, and the differences have only been exacerbated by the pandemic.