West Vancouver school district to buy N95 masks for teachers, staff

The West Vancouver School District will be buying 5,000 high quality N95 respirator masks – five for every teacher and staff member in West Vancouver schools.

Carolyn Broady, chair of the West Vancouver Board of Education, made the announcement during the first public school board meeting of the year on Tuesday evening.

Broady said the school district will spend a little more than $5,000 to supply the masks for all 1,100 staff in the school district.

The masks are expected to arrive next week, said school district spokesperson Tricia Buckley.

Broady said the school district also expects to receive a supply of rapid antigen COVID tests later this week and will be supplying two of the tests to each staff member to use if they develop symptoms.

Teachers across the province have been calling on the province to provide N95 masks to teachers following the reopening of schools in B.C. on Jan. 10.

BC Teachers Federation president Teri Mooring has said better masks could prevent illness and prevent school closures due to staff shortages.

But provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has maintained well-fitting three-layer surgical masks are sufficient in schools, saying recently that N95 masks offer only “moderately increased filtration.”

Teachers, however, have worried that they are more likely to be exposed to the highly transmissible airborne Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus as they interact with many different students indoors during the school day.

Recently, Burnaby’s Vitacore Industries, which manufactures masks, donated a supply of N95s masks to the BCTF to distribute to teachers around the province.

The masks being bought by the West Vancouver School District are in addition to those, said Broady.

Spencer Capier, president of the West Vancouver Teachers Association, said teachers in his district are happy about the decision of the school board to buy better masks for teachers, adding “there’s a lot of concern” about the Omicron variant among local teachers.

In the neighbouring North Vancouver School District, extra N95 masks will not be provided to teachers, despite a request from the local teachers’ union.

North Vancouver Teachers Association president Katrina Russell told trustees Tuesday she would like to see N95 masks provided for teachers who request them. “We do know there is still great concern about teachers ... contracting COVID,” she said.

“We know that N95 masks provide an extra layer of protection,” she said, noting “we’re seeing high levels of absences” because of illness.

Helping to prevent teachers from getting sick is in “everybody’s interests,” said Russell. “Absences are expensive for the district. Any absence we can prevent is a cost savings.”

However, North Vancouver schools superintendent Mark Pearmain said there are no plans for the school district to provide extra N95s to all teachers, noting the province has not provided funding for that. “It would be coming out of the operational budget,” he said.

In response to questions from trustee Cyndi Gerlach, Pearmain said the masks generally cost about $1 each and can be used up to 10 times.

The North Vancouver School District has about 1,200 teachers and 850 non-teaching staff in addition to managers, administrators and teachers on call.

Both North and West Vancouver school district administrators said they are tracking both staff and student absences daily.

So far “we have not seen a day yet with more than 10 per cent absentee rate” among staff, said West Vancouver schools superintendent Chris Kennedy. Student absence rates have been between 15 and 20 per cent, which is slightly above normal for January, he said.

Similarly in North Vancouver, no classes have had to move online yet.

Pearmain said COVID cases in students who attend local schools reflect what is happening in the community.

Because Omicron is highly transmissible, tends to result in milder illness, and its incubation period is shorter, schools and health authorities are no longer sending out exposure notices to parents or doing contact tracing.

Some parents, however, are choosing to report their children's positive rapid test results on both a local Facebook page that tracks North Shore COVID information and a website that tracks COVID cases in schools.

That (incomplete) information indicated there had been COVID cases (including multiple cases) in students at about 20 North Vancouver schools and at about half a dozen schools in West Vancouver during the first 10 days of classes.