Some St. Clair College students petition school for online option amid Omicron surge
CBC
Some St. Clair College students are petitioning the school's administration to offer optional online classes for the winter semester, citing concerns over the spread of Omicron.
An online petition, signed by about 1,500 students as of Thursday evening, asks that St. Clair College consider an online option for students who are worried about resuming in-person classes on Jan. 24. The request comes ahead of the college's winter semester, which is expected to go online for the first week only, starting Jan. 17.
It also comes as cases and hospitalizations of COVID-19 in Windsor-Essex continue to surge.
"It feels like St. Clair is doing the bare minimum," said Nicholas Vennettilli, who created the petition and is in his third year of the school's computer systems technology networking program.
He said he initially started the petition for his program only, but then it got shared and started receiving hundreds more signatures.
"The purpose of the petition is that we want the college to accommodate us as students for what we want ... I know lots of students want in-person learning and I know a lot of the programs need in-person learning ... but we want a choice for every student to have either in-person or online and that's what we're trying to fight for," Vennettilli said.
He added that safety measures in the fall semester were "inadequate," as his classes were often in small rooms where about 40 students were sitting "shoulder-[to]-shoulder."
CBC News spoke with two of Vennettilli's peers who also raised concerns about not being able to properly physically distance in their program's classrooms.
But John Fairley, the college's vice president of communications and community relations, told CBC News that the school has put safety measures in place to protect students, including masking and distancing.
At this time, Fairley said the college has no plans to make any schedule changes and that administration is "confident" students will be returning in person on Jan. 24.
He added that he has seen the online petition that is circulating.
"I think that we have been able to meet the students where they're at, and maybe not all of them ... [but] this has not come to us that there's this amount of people that are saying 'look we don't want to come back.' We've got more people saying they're glad to be back," he said.
"We believe that coming to the college is safe; we've got a lot of protocols in place."
He said the school hasn't had any major outbreaks since it began in-person learning in the fall and said he's "surprised" that students who attended then now suddenly don't want to be in class.
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