TORONTO, June 2 -- When the scare of SARS has passed, hundreds of parents in Toronto will have strange tales about how they kept their teenagers home in quarantine, separated from friends, isolated from the mall and closed in their bedrooms for a whole week.

One week ago, public health officials asked 1,500 high school students at Father Michael McGivney Catholic Academy to go into voluntary quarantine after a student attended classes while suffering from symptoms of severe acute respiratory syndrome. The teenagers were confined to their rooms, looking out windows that separated them from the rest of the world -- and, some said, bored out of their minds. The school is scheduled to reopen on Tuesday.

Ontario officials said that one teacher at the school is now being examined as a possible SARS case. The teacher, who was not identified, developed symptoms Saturday, which means the teacher was not contagious at the school. Officials reported today that there are now 62 active probable cases and 10 active suspect cases in Ontario. They said 32 people have died of the disease since March.

Tushar Basu, 15, a ninth-grade student at the academy, said he spent his days walking around the house, exchanging instant messages on the computer. His mother called every few hours to check on him. Sometimes he went to the back yard to look at his dog.

"First, I was happy because you are off school, but you can't really do anything except stay at the house and do nothing," Basu said in a telephone interview. "I'm sort of bored. Sleeping, eating, playing video games, what you would do on a summer day except not going out to the beaches. . . . My friends are all just as bored as me. They are upset they are not allowed to do anything."

Basu said some of his friends were worried about having been exposed to SARS. "They are all worried about catching it," Basu said. "They are all worried about what could happen. They are all asking questions: 'We don't know who it is. [What] if we were with them? What if I hang around with that person? I don't want to be the last person to know' "

According to officials, quarantines are the only way to contain the spread of the disease, which redeveloped weeks after health authorities thought it had been eradicated here. Since last week, officials have asked more than 10,000 people in Ontario to enter quarantine.

Health officials said most of the teenagers at the school, in the Toronto suburb of Markham, followed the rules: "Remain at home, spend as little time as possible in the same room with others, do not have anyone visit you at home. Wear a mask when you are in the same room with another member of your household. Change your mask as directed by your hospital. Do not share personal items, such as towels, drinking cups, cutlery and telephone receivers. Sleep in separate rooms."

No other student at the school has shown symptoms, but officials have warned all 1,700 students and staff members to remain in quarantine and watch for symptoms until midnight tonight. Despite warnings that the quarantine was a "deadly serious situation," some students played hooky. They were sighted shopping or skipping out of their houses to the streets.

Patrick Casey, a spokesman for the Regional Municipality of York, a community of 850,000 people north of Toronto, said there have been reports of 10 to 20 students who may have violated quarantine. "We were following up on all the cases. The school board was quite good at contacting parents if they had any indication the child may have been off quarantine. Often what it took was a quick comment from parent to child."

Ontario public health officials pleaded for students to stay home and threatened to force hospital isolation if they did not obey. "Teenagers who know of their friends or colleagues" breaking quarantine, said Colin D'Cunha, Ontario's commissioner of public health, "please snitch."

"And to the ones who are choosing not to go into quarantine, we have news for you," D'Cunha said, threatening to invoke orders that authorize public health officials to impose fines or lock violators in hospitals with guards at the door. "And if someone tries the legal trap of saying, 'I'm a minor,' we also serve it on the parents."

Casey said no legal orders have been issued against students.

Chris Cable, a spokeswoman for the York Catholic District School Board, said the school would be disinfected before the scheduled reopening.

Garvin Crichlow said his daughter, who is in the 11th grade at McGivney, spent most of her time in her room alone. "She distracts herself by spending hours and hours on chat lines with her friends until the wee hours of the morning. When the nurse phoned today at 11, she was sleeping."

But his daughter showed no symptoms of SARS, although she knows the boy, also in the 11th grade, who is a probable SARS case. The boy's parent, a health care worker, is listed in serious condition at a local hospital and the student is stable, officials said.

Crichlow said he was not frightened by the quarantine. "Concern, yes. We have to be concerned," he said. "Anything that brings death on people is a serious issue. But we cannot stop living."