The president of the Prince George and District Teachers’ Association welcomed the announcement that masks will be required for school staff and most students when classes resume, but said the public health orders don’t go far enough.
B.C. Education Minister Jennifer Whiteside and provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry announced that all school staff and student in Grades 4 to 12 will be required to wear masks at school. Masks will be “strongly recommended” but not required for students in Kindergarten to Grade 3.
“I would think the majority of teachers are relieved,” PGDTA president Joanne Hapke said. “But why not (Kindergarten) to (Grade) 3? There is no reason the five-, six- and seven-year-olds are not being asked to be masked.”
The relatively low vaccination rate in the Prince George local health area and across the north adds an extra layer of concern for teachers in the region, she added.
“We’re returning after having 60 days off. We’re coming back into a school environment, and classrooms, after (people) have been travelling the province and the country,” she said. “That is a huge concern at this point.”
Hapke said she is also concerned that if the school district doesn’t require parents to provide proof their child has a medical exemption from wearing a mask, some people will use it as an excuse to send their child to school without a mask.
“If it is a true medical exemption, no problem,” she said. “(But) where there is wiggle room, people wiggle.”
Hapke said she expects to have conversations with the School District 57 senior administration in the days before classes begin to ensure the rules are being applied consistently throughout the district.
But more than anything, teachers want a safe, healthy environment so they can focus on educating children, she said.
On Tuesday, Henry announced that proof of vaccination won’t be required for school staff or students in the K-12 system or post-secondary institutions.
Hapke said the B.C. Teachers’ Federation and PGDTA will advocate for their members rights, including the right to privacy about medical information, but “the BCTF is not opposed to a vaccine mandate.”
In addition to the mask mandate, the province also announced the learning cohort system which had been in place during the 2020-21 school year won’t be back in September. Students will return to essentially a normal class structure and many extra-curricular activities will be allowed to resume.
“The cohort system did not work,” Hapke said. “What would happen, is the kids would stay in their cohorts in the learning environment, but as soon as the lunch bell rang, they were mixing cohorts.”
What the cohort system did was leave teachers isolated from their peers, which meant many were left to struggle alone, she said.
School District 57 trustee Tim Bennett said the district is focused on providing a safe, healthy place for staff and students.
“We can understand there is a lot of anxiety from families and staff as we enter the school year,” Bennett said. “We need to continue to work hard with our stakeholders… to ensure we are providing that healthy environment. We have 13,000 students that are eager and waiting to get back to class.”
School trustees, teachers, parents and other education stakeholders all had a seat at the table over the summer as the plan was developed for the return to school, he said. District staff have been working since June to prepare for the school year ahead.
Bennett said the province has provided school districts with extra funding to cover additional costs related to the pandemic safety measures, as well as funding improvements to school ventilation systems, but didn’t have the specific grant amounts that School District 57 had received at hand.
The district had already been working on plans to replace aging HVAC systems in schools and improve air ventilation before the pandemic hit, he added.
The elimination of the cohort system will mean students’ in-school experience is much closer to normal than in 2020-21, he said.
“I think it is a great and really important thing for children’s mental health – and an opportunity for kids to really be kids,” Bennett said.
Prince George District Parent Advisory Council chairperson Andrea Beckett said the parent group has been voicing parent feedback and concerns to the provincial government throughout the pandemic. The DPAC executive will work with the school district’s senior staff and board of education to identify and advocate for the local issues specific to each school in the district.
"Parent's want and need to know that their children will be safe and they want to know specifically what actions will be taken to achieve this at the local school level,” Beckett said in an email. “Many parents were anxiously waiting news on what return to school would look like this coming September given that we are in the fourth wave of this pandemic, as many families needed the information in order to decide what would work best for them in regards to in person or Distributed Learning (soon to be Online Learning over the next three years as per the other recent MoE announcement) or in person learning. Many parents are concerned about the impacts the last year has had on their children's mental health as well as their learning and are looking for answers on how these impacts will be addressed both by the district and the province moving forward.”
