Hundreds of school staff remain unvaccinated in TDSB
Board reviewing medical, religious exemption requests
More than 900 employees of the Toronto District School Board seeking COVID-19 vaccine exemptions are still working with kids in schools while the board reviews their requests, a situation experts say puts unvaccinated students at risk.
The TDSB has for several weeks published the number of staff asking for medical or faith-based exemptions, which as of Nov. 21 stood at 1,093. But it was unclear how many of those employees were allowed to continue working with students while the board reviewed their requests.
When the Star asked for that number, the board initially said that such a request would require a more in-depth analysis of its data “which is not readily available at this time.” Then, a day later, when the Star sought clarification, the board said 920 of these unvaccinated staff members are in fact working day to day with students.
“Until we can make a determination related to their exemption request, they continue to follow the ministry expectation of testing,” said board spokesperson Ryan Bird, noting that unvaccinated staff must undergo rapid antigen testing three times a week while the board reviews their requests.
University of Toronto epidemiologist Colin Furness called the situation “hugely concerning” and “crazy unsafe.”
These staff “don’t want to get vaccinated and they don’t want to go on unpaid leave, and so the only other option is to go for this,” he said.
The TDSB is one of the few boards in the province to implement their own procedures on COVID vaccines for employees. Staff who reported that they were not vaccinated had until Nov. 19 to get their first shot or be put on unpaid leave. Those who had received one dose by Nov. 19 were given another month to get their second shot.
About 330 unvaccinated staff were put on non-disciplinary administrative leave without pay on Nov. 22, Bird said.
Just over 88 per cent of the TDSB’s 41,719 staff have been fully vaccinated.
Those applying for faith-based exemptions are required to submit a form answering questions about what faith, creed or sect they belong to.
Staff whose medical or faithbased exemption requests are not approved have 45 days to get vaccinated or be put on non-disciplinary administrative leave.
Anna Dewar Gully, who has two children, aged 10 and six, enrolled in a TDSB school, said the exemptions are “an important part of the story.” But she added there are other holes in the board’s vaccine procedure.
She believes the real problem is that it lacks teeth, clear reporting mechanisms and ways to follow up with unvaccinated staff.
“I feel like parents were led to believe that their children would be in classrooms with vaccinated adults,” she said. Instead, what’s in place “is not actually robust enough to protect vulnerable children.”
Both of her kids spent time in quarantine after a positive COVID case in their school — and in one case, this was due to an unvaccinated adult. But Dewar Gully was unable to get answers about who the person was or in what area of the school they worked, with the administration citing privacy concerns.
“Both colleagues, staff members and students have no idea who those folks are,” she said. “Wouldn’t you want to know what classrooms the teacher who’s unvaccinated was in?”
Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Kieran Moore, has said the rate of legitimate medical exemptions granted in the province should be between one and five in 100,000, or 0.005 per cent at the high end, based on the true incidence of rare adverse reactions to the vaccine.
Medical exemptions require a letter from a doctor or nurse practitioner. To date, the TDSB has approved four requests for medical exemptions. If that were the final tally out of the whole staff, the rate would stand at 0.009 per cent.
The board has granted zero faithbased requests.
In October, the Star found employees at 45 of the province’s largest school boards have presented medical exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine at a rate 42 times higher on average than the exemption rate Moore said would be expected in the general population.
Dr. Anna Banerji, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, noted that legitimate medical exemptions are restricted mainly to severe allergic reactions or a history of inflammation of the heart or its outer lining.
“So when you have 1,000 people wanting these exemptions, how many of those are actually acceptable from Ontario’s perspective? Probably not a lot,” she said. “In the meantime, if these people are coming to work and they don’t have a real exemption or if (the board hasn’t) figured out if these are exemptions, it puts people at risk.”
Banerji said she wouldn’t be surprised if vaccination became mandatory for teachers across Ontario in the near future, especially as cases continue to rise and with the emergence of the new, highly transmissible Omicron variant. And she said with kids age five to 11 having just become eligible to receive the shot, it will take a while before they are fully protected.
In Toronto, about 10 per cent of children five to 11 have received their first dose since the appointments opened last week.
On Tuesday, the number of outbreaks in Ontario elementary schools reached 182, a high since the start of the school year.
Furness questioned what is taking the TDSB so long to review these requests, and said the board should try to move these people to online learning, or at least out of elementary schools.
The rate at which TDSB staff are trying to get exemptions, about 2.6 per cent of the total, is “many orders of magnitude higher than it ought to be,” he said.
“I don’t know what the end game is for people seeking this,” Furness said. “But they’re putting children in a dangerous position for their own conviction and I’m incredibly unimpressed.”
I feel like parents were led to believe that their children would be in classrooms with vaccinated adults. — Anna Dewar, Toronto parent