EDUCATION
Parents deserve more info about COVID-19 cases
I
by Patti Bacchus
t was bad enough to send teachers, education assistants, and students back into stuffy, mask-optional, crowded classrooms, where it’s impossible to physically distance, in the middle of a pandemic. The provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, defends the controversial COVID-19 school plan, saying schools are controlled environments. She says that “layers of protection” will keep the deadly virus from transmitting in poorly ventilated classrooms filled with maskless small people, and that if someone brings the virus in to class, it will be quickly identified and rapid contact tracing will occur. Teachers and education assistants with risk factors like diabetes or other conditions were told they had to come into work anyway. Objectors were accused of fearmongering or dismissed as hysterical. A month after kids went back to class, there have been dozens of school exposures but, apparently, no clusters or outbreaks. Health authorities, or your school principal, may not tell you if a student or staff person in your child’s class came to school with COVID-19. If you’re a teacher and
a child in your class came to school with COVID-19, your health authority may decide you don’t need to know about it. Because telling you there was someone in your class with the virus might violate the unnamed employee or student’s privacy rights, or some kind of nonsense. You’ll get a notice if someone in your kid’s class has head lice or pinworms, so why is it different when it’s a potentially deadly virus? It’s boggles the mind. If we—or our kids—are going to spend hours a day in classrooms with people who aren’t wearing masks, we need to know if any of them has COVID-19, and we need to know it as soon as possible. I don’t care if that person was sitting 10 feet away; I want to know if I spent hours in a room with someone with COVID-19 or if my kid did. I don’t think that’s too much to expect. I started hearing about positive cases in teachers in the first week of school, but those were never made public. Then we heard about more cases when the kids were back in the second week, and letters from principals to parents about exposures started circulating online and landing in my inboxes. I’m no epidemiologist, but I do know a
UBC Doctor of Education (EdD) program in
EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND POLICY • Designed for practicing educational leaders • Students admitted in groups of 10-12, and proceed through the program as a cohort • Required coursework offered in formats that accommodates the continuing professional responsibilities of students • Each cohort normally attends classes on campus for 2 Summer Sessions (July to mid-August), and 2 Winter Sessions (September to early April). Required classes in Winter Session normally meet 4 times each term on Friday evenings and Saturdays
Groups of 10-12 students 2 Summer Sessions 2 Winter Sessions: 4 weekends each
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NOV 15, 2020 garnet.grosjean@ubc.ca edst.educ.ubc.ca/future/edd 6
THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT
OCTOBER 15 – 22 / 2020
Georgia Straight K-12 education columnist Patti Bacchus believes that Vancouver Coastal Health can do a better job of notifying parents about COVID-19 in schools. Photo by Jason Sung/Unsplash.
thing or two about communications. The first rule during a crisis is to provide accurate, honest, and timely information. That prevents the wrong information from getting shared and builds public trust. By the third week of September, I was regularly getting copies of letters regarding exposures in several schools in the Vancouver Coastal Health region that weren’t listed publicly. Around that time, VCH’s deputy chief medical health officer, Dr. Mark Lysyshyn, was quoted in the media saying they wouldn’t post all school COVID-19 exposures because doing so could lead to “stigma” and “unnecessary worry”. That didn’t go over well with West Vancouver parents, where principals at three secondary schools—Sentinel, West Vancouver secondary, and Collingwood private school—had already sent parents letters about school exposures. You know what happens when you don’t give people the information they need or want? They create a Facebook group that becomes the de facto information source when official sources fail to do their jobs. That’s risky, because inaccurate crowdsourced information can easily be spread, but I don’t blame parents for creating such groups. I blame VCH for failing to share accurate, timely information. In West Vancouver, parents got minimal information regarding an exposure at Caulfield elementary but shared more information among themselves. They discovered that more than half a class tested positive for COVID, in addition to some siblings, parents, and grandparents. Parents were advised they didn’t need to have
kids tested if they weren’t showing symptoms, but one mom went ahead and had her child tested anyway, and the test came back positive. Three other asymptomatic cases later tested positive. Good grief. What’s it going to take? Yet Henry insisted it wasn’t an outbreak, because kids were self-isolating at home. Earlier this month, frustrated parents started circulating an open letter to Henry and Dr. Patricia Daly, the VCH’s chief medical health officer. The letter says parents are “rapidly losing faith in the cohort system” and opting to keep their kids home, with little to no educational support. The letter asks for prompt disclosure of school exposures and isolation of full cohorts instead of waiting for contact tracers to determine close contacts for isolations. They also want school-aged siblings included in the isolation strategy. Henry was adamant in media briefings earlier this months that parents are getting all the information they need. Yet I’m still finding out about COVID-19 exposures more quickly via social media and parents forwarding me notification letters (keep them coming) than I can find on health-authority websites, and so can parents. If Henry expects parents to trust schools with their children—and, by extension, with their families’ health—she needs to make sure parents and school staff are getting as much information as possible, and as quickly as possible, and knock it off with the “we know best about what you need to know and/or don’t know” approach. Parents can handle the truth, and they deserve the truth. g
