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The ongoing pandemic has put masks and sanitizers on back-to-school shopping lists, but several parents, teachers and school staff are hunting for even more unusual materials: cut logs for the schoolyard, tarps to shield soccer pitches from sun and rain, and cheap yoga mats for outdoor seating. With many school plans failing to promise smaller class sizes and epidemiologists noting less infection risk outdoors, an ardent movement of teachers, parents and sympathetic principals are urgently pursuing ambitious outdoor learning plans they hope can be incorporated into the curriculum.

Veronica Gerber was set to go before Ontario's human rights tribunal on Monday in a bid to see her mother more often during the COVID-19 pandemic. But three days before the case was to be heard, Dorothea Gerber, 82, died at the Toronto long-term care facility where she had lived for more than a decade. Veronica Gerber had been scheduled to appear before the tribunal seeking an interim order to restore her visitation rights to their pre-pandemic status.