BC Teachers Federation President Teri Mooring is concerned about the alarming rate teachers in the north and around the province are calling in sick.
Mooring told Vista Radio a lot of the recent exposure events are happening outside the Lower Mainland.
“It’s an incredibly stressful time. We are seeing it more and more with an increase in the number of notices being sent out from a boarder range of locals, originally it was more concentrated on the Vancouver Coastal and Fraser Health Authorities and that has absolutely changed.”
“We are seeing many more exposure cases across the province and it is always stressful when teachers and families get notifications that their children or a staff member have been identified as a close contact.”
Mooring is aware of several staff members at Heather Park Elementary in Prince George who called in sick.
However, she would not confirm that those calls were COVID-related.
This has renewed calls once again from the BCTF to see two of their long-standing recommendations be enforced by the Ministry of Education.
“This is one of the reasons why we are calling on the government to impose a mask mandate and to reduce class sizes because what we don’t want is to see exposure events turn into the in-school transmission.”
As for the policy on calling in sick or monitoring any potential COVID-19 symptoms, Mooring mentioned the Health Check ministered by the provincial government has undergone some minor tweaks.
“Teachers, when they go to work every day need to actively identify that they are not experiencing any symptoms, that’s one thing and if they are then they need to be away and that is certainly causing more absences. At one time, the testing results took up to about seven or more days, and now the time frame has been reduced quite a bit, which is positive.”
“The other issue is of course if there is a positive test, then the teacher needs to be off for the ten days post symptoms and it’s usually 14 days as a general rule. As we know, under the last decade there has been dramatic underfunding and a lack of replacement teachers, in particular, teachers often came to work sick and there is a much lower tolerance for that right now. When they have been contact-traced, then they need to monitor for their symptoms and if they are identified as a close contact that has been exposed and 8-1-1 advises that they need to take a test then that’s what needs to happen.”
Contact tracing backlog?
Joanne Hapke of the Prince George District Teachers Association is raising some concern over the contact tracing backlog that is occurring within Northern Health, with many teachers not being notified of any potential exposure until well into the incubation period.
“When people are not being notified of for ten days or upwards of ten days that they may have been exposed that is a big concern. We have many concerns about is the process working, is contact tracing working? We are grateful that the district has processes in place that we are able to take the time that we need while we self-isolate and get tested. That is a support to our teachers but we have concerns around Northern Health and how to do the contact tracing in a timely manner.”
Hapke is also on the bandwagon of the BCTF’s calls for a much more broad masking policy and smaller class sizes.
“We know that schools, especially elementary schools have very little protection to keep them safe and all that we have really is physical distancing, hand washing, and masks within hallways. We do support reducing the density within classrooms, we do support masks having to be worn within classrooms and we also support physical barriers for other teachers who work with multiple cohorts throughout the school.”