The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Parents group, NSTU deplore in-person classes
Nova Scotia’s 125,000 public school students are scheduled to return to the classroom next week despite appeals from a parents group and the Nova Scotia Teachers Union for a period of online learning to ride out the peak of the omicron variant.
“It’s a head-scratcher,” NSTU president Paul Wozney said Tuesday of Nova Scotia’s decision to surge ahead with school reopenings on Monday while neighbouring provinces with epidemiology and COVID situations significantly more favourable than Nova Scotia’s are taking “precautionary measures to prevent omicron from significantly impeding the school system to function.”
New Brunswick and Ontario recently announced that schools will move to online learning for at least the first two weeks of the post-christmas break.
Wozney said New Brunswick had already enacted more stringent in-person learning measures than exist in Nova Scotia.
“Their Grade 8 and up students have been attending on a rotating basis to reduce class sizes for months,” he said.
Nova Scotia Parents for Public Education said in a release Tuesday that it is gravely concerned about the government’s current approach.
“At a time when our government cannot host press conferences in person and when people are being told to work from home if possible, to keep gathering limits small,
and ‘go slow,’ and when case numbers are breaking records daily, we are planning to send 125,000 students and thousands of teachers and staff back to school in person,” the release from the volunteerrun group dedicated to a strong and safe public education system stated.
“How is having 15 per cent of our population gathering indoors every day not going to magnify our spread?”
Stacey Rudderham of the parents group challenged the layered approach that public health officials say will make schools safe.
“Under-12s have not had time to be fully vaccinated, PCR testing is not being made available to teachers or students, social distancing is not possible in classrooms regardless of furniture, ventilation is non-existent in most schools, contact tracing no longer exists, and school case notices will no longer be issued,” Rudderham said.
“So, what are these mystery layers?”
In Newfoundland and Labrador, portable air-purification systems have been purchased and installed in every classroom, Wozney said.
“In-person learning is significantly better protected in these other jurisdictions than classrooms in Nova Scotia are,” he said. “
Wozney said at least onethird of Nova Scotia schools rely on passive ventilation, which involves no mechanical means of moving air through a building, and one in five Nova Scotia schools have dated mechanical ventilation systems that don’t provide the minimum six full air exchanges per hour.
The passive ventilation schools “are old buildings” designed for cantilevered windows, many of which have been replaced with windows that do not open at all, he said.
Wozney said “it’s unknown” which buildings fall in those categories because three different governments, the Liberals under Stephen Mcneil and Iain Rankin, and the Tim Houston PC government, have refused to disclose to the public site-by-site ventilation specifications and inspection results.
Of the school buildings that are designed to produce the minimum six full air exchanges per hour, he said it’s unclear how many of those are functioning at capacity or how recently they’ve been inspected or cleaned.
“We have dozens and dozens of photos from members across Nova Scotia … that demonstrate garbage buckets full of dust and dirt pulled from openings in vent systems that are supposed to circulate air,” Wozney said. “That raises real questions about whether or not schools that do exchange air six times an hour are exchanging clean healthy air or whether they are exchanging filthy, pathogen-filled air.”
Wozney said all three governments have said the information is at hand but have not released the true state of ventilation in individual schools.
“There is a systemic unwillingness to be transparent about ventilation, they just want to say that’s it fine without proving that it’s fine,” he said.
Education Minister Becky Druhan declined an interview request Tuesday but Houston said at a COVID briefing Monday that ventilation is a real issue and he hears the concerns of teachers, students and parents.
“I haven’t had a chance to chat with the team about random (air) testing but I am personally open to that idea,” Houston said. “We’ll do what we can and to the extent there are shorter-term fixes, we’ll be happy to implement them. Some of them are longerterm fixes.”
Wozney said it “strains all reason” why Nova Scotia is not following Newfoundland’s lead to purchase and install the portable air filtration appliances, a process that he predicts would take two or three weeks.
Both Houston and Dr. Robert Strang, the province’s chief medical officer of health, said Tuesday that the focus is more self-management of COVID, more personal responsibility.
Wozney said leaving contract tracing to the uninitiated in the school system is not a good idea.
“What it means is we are going to have way more staff required to self-isolate with home-grown contact tracing then we would with public health experts doing the work and that is going to chew into, in very short order, the operational capacity of schools.”
The parents group said parents have been advised to notify principals if their child tests positive but school policies make it clear that principals can’t share that information unless advised to do so by public health and public health has said it won’t be doing in-school notifications.
“Parents providing information is entirely useless if it is not shared to help protect others,” the group said in its release. “So how will spread be managed in schools? Are we just throwing our hands up and giving up? Deciding that COVID is so rampant we cannot even try to protect our young and vulnerable? We have an obligation to create a safe school environment for our children. And the Department of Education has an obligation to provide a safe workplace for teachers and school staff.”
Strang said Monday that it is now being recommended that the general public use properly fitted, three-layer non-medical cloth masks or properly fitted medical masks.
“Regardless of which mask you choose, it needs to be three-ply and wearing it properly is as important as the type of mask you choose,” he said. “Wearing a mask properly means it needs to cover your nose, mouth and chin. There shouldn’t be gaps between your face and your mask, so check the tops and bottom edges for air leaks and adjust the ties, ear loops or nose piece to get a snug fit.”
The Education Department said in a pre-christmas release that more three-ply masks have been ordered and all staff and students will each receive an additional threeply mask.
Wozney said there is still a question of “whether or not those three-ply masks are actually in the hands of schools to deploy.”
Wozney said it’s unclear if the masks procured are a onesize-fits-all as was the case with previously distributed masks in schools or if they have the adjustable loops and nose pieces to ensure a proper fit.
“It boils down to whether or not they are actually a good fit for kids’ faces,” he said.
Wozney said remote learning provides a firebreak to the risk of contact spread of Omicron.
“Dr. Strang’s stubbornness to say schools are safe when clearly they are set up for failure strains a lot of people’s hearts and minds as to how that statement can possibly be made,” he said.