Several boards said they have encountered problems with testing and are awaiting more information from their public-health units or ministry-supplied private vendors.
“The delay has been frustrating for us,” said Scott Scantlebury, a spokesman at Windsor’s Greater Essex County District School Board. He said the four local boards were assigned a third-party vendor, but two of them required French-language services that the vendor would not provide.
“We have, as of last night, been assigned a new third-party vendor … to conduct the testing and we are now able to proceed,” he said Wednesday.
In Toronto and Ottawa, hospitals or public-health units have worked with schools to set up mobile testing clinics or provide students and staff with at-home testing kits. Elsewhere, there have been long lineups for school-based tests or complaints that the testing sites are too far from a student’s school.