School board to educate unvaccinated staff; must agree to watch video, perform self-testing

Some good news and some serious news from Tuesday’s Algoma District School Board (ADSB) meeting.

School boards continue to collect, post and submit data as to how many staff and visitors are fully or partially vaccinated - or unvaccinated - in accordance with provincial government COVID-19 regulations.

10 per cent of ADSB staff who have submitted attestation forms are unvaccinated, said Frank Palumbo, ADSB superintendent of human resources, speaking to the board.

“Those staff who have a single dose or who are unvaccinated will be required to view an educational video and will be required to do what’s called a self-administered rapid antigen COVID-19 test,” Palumbo told the board.

Those staff will be required to perform those tests at home on their own time and upload the results of the tests on an app which will be soon provided to school boards by the Ministry of Education, Palumbo said.

“The video is an educational video on the benefits of vaccination and we’re waiting for that to be presented to us as well,” Palumbo said.

Unvaccinated staff will soon have to perform self-administered rapid antigen COVID-19 tests twice a week - on days the board selects - and 48 hours before they visit an ADSB site, Palumbo said.

Staff and visitors with the ADSB, for the most part, are getting vaccinated and submitting forms attesting to their vaccination status, with or without supporting documentation.

“We constantly are getting more and more attestation forms in…(but) we have been able to determine that as of now, 19 per cent of our employees, which is about 370 staff (out of 1,988 employees), have not submitted an attestation form yet,” Palumbo said.

“We are currently working with this group to assist them in completing the forms because we feel that a large portion of that group may have been vaccinated but they lack the ability to get to a phone or a computer to input that data... we’re hoping to significantly reduce that percentage of staff who have not submitted attestation forms yet.”

“We are hoping to be working with this group of 19 per cent that haven’t been able to submit their attestation forms yet by the end of this week.”

“Our hope is that we can get all of our staff double vaccinated and then we won’t have to worry about attestation,” Palumbo said.

All publicly-funded school boards, as of September, are required by the province to disclose vaccination status rates for teachers and other staff employed by a school board (the statistical information posted on each board’s website). 

The Ministry of Education, in August, announced its intention to introduce vaccination disclosure policies for all publicly-funded school board employees.

The policy applies to all staff and others (such as visitors, volunteers, contractors, other professionals and school bus drivers) in direct contact with students and/or staff for the 2021-22 school year.

Meanwhile, the board is seeing greater than expected numbers of students in its elementary and secondary schools.

“It’s probably the biggest increase we’ve seen in a very long time, which is very exciting. We’ve been busy adding classrooms across the district,” said Lucia Reece, ADSB director of education, discussing September enrolment numbers presented to the board.

As of Sept. 14, there were 6,825 students enrolled in ADSB Junior Kindergarten (JK) to Grade 8.

That’s an increase of 433 students from the projected numbers contained in the March 2021 Director’s Report.

As of Sept. 21, 2021, there were 3,478 students enrolled in ADSB Grades 9 to 12.

That’s an increase of 282 students from the projected numbers contained in the March 2021 Director’s Report.

So, where are those students coming from?

“We have a good number of students that have moved to the area, many to Sault Ste. Marie,” said Joe Maurice, ADSB superintendent.

“As we drive around the neighbourhoods we see that houses are selling pretty quickly, and we’re also seeing that in our district locations as well. We continue to receive people from other countries as well.”

ADSB Director Reece noted more families with children and teens are moving to the Sault to get away from the hustle and bustle of bigger cities, parents now able to work remotely from home while enjoying a slower pace of life in a smaller city in their spare time.