A physical distancing sign is seen during a media tour of Hastings Elementary school in Vancouver on Sept. 2, 2020.JONATHAN HAYWARD/The Canadian Press
British Columbia is deploying six specialized COVID-19 teams across the province to help school districts better communicate with kids and their parents on potential virus exposures as well as improve individual school’s safety plans.
The union for the province’s 47,000 teachers has been demanding stronger protections from the virus since the current school year began in September. It welcomed the move, but said many more measures are needed to make schools safer.
Education Minister Jennifer Whiteside told reporters Tuesday that the provincial government is investing $900,000 in these hybrid units to be stationed at a key school district in each of the province’s five regional health authorities, with a separate unit for private schools across the province.
She said these teams, which will include representatives of local teachers and school districts, can help districts with improving measures such as configuring classrooms differently so that supplies aren’t shared. She added that, among other things, the teams can also ensure that the system of self-assessment checks is being followed by everybody so no one comes to school sick.
“What our partners have been calling for is more support with their safety plans on the ground, more communications on the ground, so that we can ensure that our safety plans do what they’re designed to do,” Ms. Whiteside said.
Terri Mooring, BC Teachers’ Federation president, questioned why some of the province’s 60 districts hit hardest by the pandemic are receiving the same amount of help as those regions with far fewer potential school exposures.
“We keep on having a one-size-fits-all approach across the province to doing everything, but in reality it’s the Fraser Health Authority that has by far the most cases of COVID-19,” Ms. Mooring said.
She added that three districts in that health authority have now had potential classroom exposures of virus variants: Surrey, Maple Ridge and Delta.
Julia MacRae, who represents Surrey teachers for the BCTF, said the rapid response team is definitely a welcome development in her community, which has roughly 75,000 students attending 140 different educational sites. These teams can help clarify which rules in the 35-page provincial guide are the most important for teachers and principals, she said.
The new team, Ms. MacRae said, can also help with the massive outreach needed any time a student or staff member is confirmed to have walked onto school property while positive with the virus.
“The people are so strung out, it’s not my role to stand up for administrators, but boy are they ever putting in long, long days,” said Ms. MacRae, who taught for 25 years before being elected to the union to a one-year term. “They’re spending their entire Saturdays and Sundays calling people.”
Ms. MacRae said one team for the whole health authority’s jurisdiction is clearly not enough, given the potential exposure of the variants to schools outside of Surrey.
Both Ms. MacRae and Ms. Mooring underlined how dangerous teaching has become during the pandemic. They pointed to provincial data showing that COVID-19 claims from educators for compensation have risen more than 250 per cent in the past three months to 240 cases – almost all of which involve public-school teachers. Those teachers rank third-highest in number of claims by industry subsector, trailing long-term care workers (959 claims) and staff in acute-care settings (949), according to WorkSafe BC.
Ms. Whiteside said her ministry is now reviewing these data.
Ms. Mooring said teachers clearly should be part of the vaccination push that the province will soon roll out for essential workers and first responders with the AstraZeneca drug, which is separate from the age-based system for the wider population announced Monday.
U.S. President Joe Biden announced Tuesday that he would be directing states to ensure that all teachers get a vaccine jab by the end of this month.
Communications staff in B.C.’s Education Ministry did not immediately respond to The Globe and Mail’s question Tuesday afternoon as to whether teachers will be prioritized by the province in a similar fashion.
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