The Superintendent for the Kamloops-Thompson School District says he will leave any decisions on bringing in enhanced COVID-19 school safety measures up to health officials.

With students on spring break, Terry Sullivan was asked if SD73 would make any changes to its safety plan after Kamloops-area school exposures increased after the winter break.

“We’re not a health organization, we’re a teaching and learning organization so the health and safety of all of us is really the mandate of the ministry of health so whatever Dr. Henry says and whatever Interior Health says with respect to it, I pay attention to,” he told NL News.

Sullivan adds he’s a little surprised to still see a high rate of COVID-19 transmission in the Kamloops area. He says he was hoping to see cases drop as people begin to get vaccinated as things begin to warm up heading into spring.

“That means that we have to continue to be on alert with respect with what we have to do and making sure that we continue to adhere to the guidelines until we see that this is going to end,” Sullivan added. “I think we all know that that is only going to end when we have high numbers of our population in British Columbia being vaccinated.”

“I don’t have you know the background in health but maybe somewhat naively I was expecting that we would start to see this being abated at this point in time, but we haven’t. Certainly in the last couple of weeks in our own communities.”

Sullivan previously told NL News he was concerned about COVID cases in schools increasing after spring break.

New data is expected today, but the most recent data shows an even 100 new cases of COVID-19 reported in the Kamloops local health area during the week of Feb. 28 to March 6.

That is down from 124 cases the week prior, but it was the region with the most case across all of Interior Health.

BCTF continues to call for mandatory masks for elementary schools

The BC Teachers’ Federation says new data from WorkSafeBC supports the mandatory use of masks in elementary as well as middle and secondary classrooms.

The data shows 88 occupational claims for COVID-19 infections have been allowed from elementary teachers, compared with only 26 from secondary teachers.

“We think there’s a couple of reasons for that,” BCTF President Teri Mooring said on NL Newsday. “One is the lack of a mask mandate for students and the other is – there’s been no attempt in elementary schools across the province to reduce classroom density to promote physical distancing.”

Mooring says they aren’t advocating masks for kindergarten age kids – but she notes – it has been done with great success in other jurisdictions. For now, she says all the union can do is ask parents to speak to their kids about the importance of wearing a mask.

“We think that after Spring Break there’s going to be a real need for additional safety measures,” she added. “It feels like right now we’re in a race between the variant and the vaccines and that’s the concern right now.”

B.C. health officials maintain transmission in schools is low – but Mooring says the government won’t share their evidence of that.

“Government is collecting data in the provincial health office on in-school transmissions, on the number of education workers that have contracted COVID, the number of students that have contracted COVID but they’re not releasing that information,” she said.

The Board Chair of the Kamloops-Thompson School District previously told NL News having a regional approach to COVID-19 restrictions in schools would be beneficial, in some situations.

Speaking on NL Newsday last month, Rhonda Kershaw however said the board’s top priority remains educating the roughly 15,000 students it has in the district, echoing the statements made by Sullivan.

“The public health office, really, we take our direction from them. So I wouldn’t want to necessarily have boards of education taking on a public health role. Those two need to be separate,” she said. “I think that having some regional view to this would absolutely be of benefit in certain circumstances. You know having a regional approach to things does make sense.”

The BC Teachers Federation, the opposition BC Liberals, as well as parents and teachers have been calling on the government to give school districts more flexibility to implement health and safety measures based on their needs.

– With files from Brett Mineer