CHAT News File Photo

By Chris Brown

'can't wait any longer'

School boards will collaborate on pushing government to make school staff eligible for vaccine

Apr 28, 2021 | 5:17 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB – The area’s three school divisions are hoping strength in numbers will help convince the provincial government to make school staff eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccination.

Medicine Hat Public School Division’s board of trustees passed a motion at its Tuesday meeting to push the government on the issue.

Medicine Hat Catholic Board of Education and Prairie Rose Public Schools released similar statements today and the three will work together to continue to press the government on the issue.

Public board vice chair Rick Massini says the letters are being sent to the premier, health minister and education minister.

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Cases have steadily risen in area schools amid the third wave of COVID-19 rattling the province. The new variants of concern are hitting young people harder than the original strain of the virus did.

Massini says it’s time for more action from the province.

“It’s becoming an almost every day thing one positive or suspected positive case and of course these new variants are very concerning,” he says. “They’re having quite a toll on younger people. We have some teenage students who now have complications or at least some serious reactions to this virus and so it’s growing both in numbers and severity. We just can’t wait any longer for something to happen here.”

Schools, densely populated and operating at nearly 100 per cent capacity all year, present “all sorts of opportunity for transmission to occur even though we are taking the utmost of care in reducing the risks,” he adds.

He says there are about 7,000 students more than 400 teachers and another 300-400 support and auxiliary staff in the public division.

Massini says the learning experience is disrupted any time teachers or students have to quarantine.

Students quarantining also has impacts outside the school and in the larger community.

He says there’s a multiplicity that comes into play when a pandemic like this takes over.

“It doesn’t just affect the schools it affects families and their home life but it also affects the community in that it takes people out of the workforce and in some case probably forces businesses to close or change their hours and such like that which affects the economy.”

Massini has high praise for the central office staff and the in-school staff who’ve been phenomenal throughout the past year.

The boards say that under the province’s vaccine rollout plan, about one-third of teachers aren’t able to be vaccinated until the end of June.