At 17, Christina Kyritsis is a runner. She’s so fast, she’s been a national 800-metre champion and won Ontario gold twice, and she’s heading to Boston College this fall on a sweet track scholarship.

But the lanky Grade 12 athlete almost missed her last high school qualifier Monday because of an extracurricular boycott that’s supposed to be over, yet is still keeping pockets of Ontario students from their last chance at sports in a turbulent school year.

The A-student at Toronto’s East York Collegiate found herself with no track team this spring, even though the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation has lifted its boycott of extracurricular activities.

“She wanted to go out with a bang, but it’s taken me a week to get permission to take her and other students to the meet,” noted her father, George Kyritsis, a math teacher at East York, a school he said “is usually a vibrant place, buzzing with spring teams.”

Luckily, he said, a last-minute ruling this weekend by school and athletic officials with the Toronto District School Board meant Kyritsis could take his daughter and other interested students to the meet Monday and Tuesday at Etobicoke’s Centennial Park.

He’s grateful, but on short notice only Christina and Grade 12 student Jonathan Nykorchuk signed up. Jonathan won first place in javelin Monday and Christina came second in the 400-metre race. Both have events Tuesday.

“I wanted to run for the school this last time; it’s what I do,” said Christina, noting East York also has no team in cricket, baseball or flag football. Only soccer is proceeding, and Grade 12 student Stephen Efstathiadis said even that was a battle.

“All other sports have been cancelled,” he said. “Honestly, you can even tell when you walk through the hall, there’s no school spirit. You don’t hear sports on the announcements — ‘We won this, we won that’ — there’s no cheering.”

In York Region, the number of public high schools with spring teams this year has dropped about 22 per cent, more than the usual fluctuation of 10 per cent up or down, noted Steve Shantz, athletic co-ordinator for the region’s public, Catholic and private schools.

“We’re giving people a lot of leeway for late sign-up this year but girls’ soccer is down by about six teams and about six schools are not sending track teams and there are about six fewer teams in girls’ slo-pitch,” he said. On the up side, there are more mountain biking teams and one more in lacrosse.

Both Peel and Durham boards say all high schools have something on the go but a handful of elementary schools are missing some if not all after-school programs.

In Toronto, teachers at Winona Drive Senior Public School and Guildwood Junior School continue their after-school boycott, while teachers at Maurice Cody Public School have recently decided to resume activities, nearly two months after the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario lifted its advice to boycott them.

One issue at these schools has been teachers’ concerns they could be disciplined for refusing to fully fill out first-term report cards, as their union suggested last fall.

Trustee Shelley Laskin said no teachers have been disciplined over incomplete report cards.

“At Cody, there’s a sense that fall sports and fall clubs will be back,” she noted, but “there’s not a lot that can be salvaged this year.”

Winona has track and field teams, at Cody, run by teachers and at Winona, by the principal.

Winona parent Richard Urquhart said students have not only missed out on athletics but also field trips and class trips to Quebec. He said parents have been given very little information.

Other schools managed to run activities, some even during the union-advised “pause.”

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“As soon as things were back on, they were full steam ahead at those schools,” said Urquhart. “That makes it worse — it makes it look like they don’t care, that their beef with the government is more important than the children they say they care about. It’s pretty disappointing.”

Michael Barrett, president of the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association, said activities vary from school to school. Some elementary teachers are waiting for a deal to be reached between their union and the province, as the province’s secondary teachers already have ratified.

“Some are saying the year is pretty much shot; we’ll wait until September to see what happens over the summer,” he said.