POLL: Most local poll respondents don't think students should return to the classroom

Students have been learning online since after the April break, and whether or not they will return to the classroom this year is still up in the air.

The move to remote learning was announced shortly after Ontario announced a state of emergency on April 7 and a stay-at-home order on April 8. The measures were initially slated to end on May 6, but were extended until at least May 20. When it was announced on April 12 that students would be learning from home indefinitely, the province cited soaring rates of COVID-19. 

At the time, Premier Doug Ford said the government will look closely at the COVID-19 data to determine when in-person classes can resume.

Parents and caregivers have since been anxiously awaiting guidance.

So we wanted to know – Do Saultites want to see students return to the classroom this school year?

We thought this could be a great opportunity to use our new polling system. Without getting too technical, our new polls allows SooToday (and other sites in the Village Media family) to better capture relevant data, detect and prevent fraudulent votes, detect and prevent robots and filter out non-local and duplicate votes.

So, we posed the question: Should students go back to school if Ontario's stay-at-home order is extended next week?

SooToday's poll showed that most confirmed local voters, 62 per cent, think students shouldn't be returning to the classroom while 38 per cent think they should.

The breakdown was as follows:

• 226 respondents voted yes (38 per cent)
• 365 respondents voted no (62 per cent)

A total of 591 confirmed local votes were cast in the poll. This poll had a 4.02 per cent margin of error, 19 times out of 20.