Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry says a new order allowing medical health officers to ask school boards to gather information on whether staff members are vaccinated will help determine which schools are most at risk of outbreaks.
Henry said the order is meant to help medical health officers who are working with school districts to make decisions around the need for vaccine mandates, which are the responsibility of individual school boards.
Since the Christmas break, several B.C. schools have announced functional closures, saying they didn’t have enough staff to teach students because of illness.
“The first step in this — and this is part of the advice that we’ve been providing to school districts — is understanding the vaccination status of school staff,” Henry said.
“This order also assists MHOs in knowing which schools are most at risk of outbreaks, and it’s a way of us being able to prioritize and manage and support schools.”
Sooke School board chairman Ravi Parmar said the order was unexpected, but the vaccination data could be useful.
“We’ve had stats put forward that teachers are 95 per cent vaccinated,” he said. “I think we’ll now know in some districts whether that’s the case or not.”
He said vaccination rates for teachers are higher on the south Island than in some other areas, like the Interior or the north. Knowing exact vaccination rates could allow a direct assessment of how various sectors in a district are affected by COVID-19, Parmar said.
“It would be fairly helpful to know: ‘Is it going to affect busing?’ Is is going to affect custodians? Is it going to affect teachers in the classroom?’ ”
The Sooke board brought in a rule in December that all newly hired workers in the district must be vaccinated, but stopped short of a similar measure for existing staff.
“Certainly enacting a vaccine mandate is still on the table for Sooke,” Parmar said. “It’s a conversation that we’re still having as a board.”
Greater Victoria School District interim superintendent Deb Whitten said she sees the new order coming into effect on an as-needed basis.
“If we saw an outbreak in a school or in a local area, then Island Health or the local health authority could ask for vaccination status of all staff,” said Whitten, adding that information is not currently being collected. “We wouldn’t act without the direction of the local health authority.”
The Greater Victoria School Board voted in December not to impose a vaccine mandate on staff. Whitten pointed to recent B.C. Centre for Disease Control statistics that show 97 per cent of people 12 and over in the Victoria area have one vaccination dose and 95 per cent have two.
Saanich School District superintendent Dave Eberwein also noted that Henry’s announcement is “a passive order” — meaning there isn’t any action required for now by school districts.
“This is just a legislative option for the local medical health officer.”
The board has not voted on establishing a vaccine mandate and has no discussions planned, said Saanich School Board chairman Tim Dunford.
Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association president Winona Waldron said her group doesn’t oppose a vaccine mandate but is against collecting “teachers’ confidential medical data” without a clear purpose.
She noted that the B.C. Public School Employers’ Association has already established a template that school boards can use for bringing in vaccine mandates.
