Vaccination numbers high in schools
Ministry has required school boards to disclose its percentage of vaccinated staff
Outside the student body, any individual working at schools within Niagara has attested to being fully vaccinated or are currently partaking in the rapid testing program, said both the District School Board of Niagara (DSBN) and Niagara Catholic District School Board.
As part of the Ministry of Education’s requirement to publicly disclose the percentage of staff who have been vaccinated, DSBN and Niagara Catholic are uploading numbers to its website every two weeks.
Current numbers as of Nov. 5, show 94 per cent of DSBN school board employees (and 80 per cent of occasional workers and 92 per cent of other individuals) have attested to being fully vaccinated, with the non-vaccinated number sitting at five per cent.
Only nine individuals have provided a medical exempted (from a medical doctor), out of about 260 that remain unvaccinated.
At Niagara Catholic, 84.5 per cent of board staff, and 92 per cent of other individuals, have said they are fully vaccinated. About 170 employees remaining unvaccinated, with five of the those people having provided medical exemptions.
All unvaccinated staff are required to take regular rapid antigen tests twice a week — increasing shortly to three times a week said DSBN director of education Warren Hoshizaki — to ensure they are negative for COVID-19 before entering a school facility.
And so far, so good, said Hoshizaki.
“We had the advantage of having some of our staff vaccinated very early in the process in April, so I think that really helped,” he said.
“I think our numbers are very good. If you take a look across the province, 95 per cent that are vaccinated of all the staff in our school — our vaccinated (rate) is very high.”
Looking at the information provided online, DSBN Parents Involvement Committee chair Lisa Mooney, said “the majority of parents are happy with the vaccination rates,” adding they are also happy testing is continuing to be enforced for those that are unvaccinated.
But she did want clarification on the online numbers regarding those that have yet to fill out an attestation form.
In the updated numbers by DSBN, there are currently zero school board employees that have not filled out the form. There remains 126 people — in the occasional/temporary board employees and other individuals categories — who have not informed DSBN of their status.
Hoshizaki clarified that those individuals are not working for the school board. He said they have a current list, and if, for example, a substitute teacher is needed only those who have attested to their vaccination status will be called.
“The ones that are on our list to call are either testing or vaccinated, just like regular staff,” he said. “Others (that) are not even on, we take them off.”
At Niagara Catholic, 335 board employees and 57 other individuals have not submitted an attestation form.
But similar to the response from DSBN, Niagara Catholic director of education Camillo Cipriano said most, if not all, of those numbers involve people who are not working at the school.
“For the most part, those that have not let us know, are occasional employee group and in fact most likely many of those are inactive meaning they haven’t worked for us for a long period of time, but they’re still on our roster,” he said.
Two months into the new school year, Cipriano said they are “really pleased” with how it has gone overall. School hallways are looking like, sounding like — and locker rooms in high school are smelling like — typical schools.
“After almost two years of this, (kids) are really good at making sure that they follow all of our safety protocols. So we’ve been able to really introduce a lot of the activities and things that make school kind of what we all remember school to be,” said Cipriano.
Cipriano said the first five to six weeks went well, with a limited number of cases in schools, and while those numbers have gone up slightly in the past few weeks it is “nothing really that alarming,” he said.
DSBN said they are continuing to work with Niagara health when they have outbreaks, as they did last week at John Brant Public School, hosting community clinics over the weekend to ensure there were no asymptomatic students and staff.
For both school boards, the number of cases have followed a similar pattern as that of Niagara Region. And inline with a trend seen across the province, as COVID-19 has been a larger problem in elementary schools than in secondary schools, likely due to the ability to vaccinate 12- to 18-year old students.
And the limited cases within high schools have allowed both boards to get back to a little bit of normalcy.
“It’s allowed us to provide a lot of extracurricular activities. Our football has been running — not everywhere … and we’re now going to get into winter sports. So we’re trying to modify it so that we can be as safe as we possibly can,” Hoshizaki said.