Trustees in the London-area’s largest school board voted Tuesday night to reinstate a temporary in-class mask requirement – despite having no tools to enforce it – in a move that followed other large Ontario boards in Ottawa and Hamilton.
The Thames Valley District school board’s chair, Lori-Ann Pizzolatto voted in favor of motion, which was presented by trustee Corrine Rahman. The motion, approved 7-5, will require students to wear a mask at school, but they won’t have to provide medical documentation for exemptions.
“I feel like absence rates are too high and as the health units have said this was a tool in the tool chest to use,” Pizzolatto said. “I think we need to use all the tools we can to ensure our schools are open and hopefully decrease absence rates.”
But what good is the requirement if, as the board’s own lawyer noted, there’s no way to force compliance? Pizzolatto said that work will be left to the board’s education director, Mark Fisher.
The trustees’ Tuesday night directive is essentially unenforceable, according to the school board’s own legal counsel. “Boards don’t have the authority. . . there’s no enforcement mechanism available to the board,” Ali Chahbar said.
The Thames Valley board has 13 voting trustees and they essentially voted along rural-urban lines on masks:
- Supporting masks in class were: Sheri Moore (London), Rahman (London), Carol Antone (Indigenous representative), Peter Cuddy (London), Laura Gonzalez (London), Sheri Polhill (London) and Pizzolato (London).
- Voting in opposition were: Graham Hart (Oxford County), Sean Hunt (Middlesex County), Bruce Smith (Elgin County), Meagan Ruddock (Elgin County) and Arlene Morrell (Middlesex County).
Trustee Barb Yeoman (Oxford County) was absent.
The Ontario government on March 21 ended the law requiring masks to be worn in all indoor public places, including at schools. That has coincided with an uptick in COVID hospitalizations in London, and the virus-related shutdown of two local schools – and Fisher on Tuesday said schools remain “operationally impaired” due to the virus.
Last week about 10 per cent of board employees, or 1,000 staff members, were off sick, he said. That has led to drastic steps in both the Thames Valley and London Catholic boards to keep classrooms open.
But Fisher also advised trustee it would be impossible to police the reinstated mask requirement. “Education Minister (Stephen) Leece has been clear . . . masks are optional. So there would not be any sanctions for those who elected not to wear mask.”
Rahman, the driving force behind the return-of-masks mandates, said she feels her job as trustee is “to protect the health of students and staff” and masks can help do that.
“I feel we need to protect those who are in our buildings,” she said during the two-hour debate. “We need to keep schools open.”
Dr. Alex Summers is the top public health official for London and Middlesex County and Dr. Ninh Tran is his peer in Elgin and Oxford counties. Last week, they told trustees the spike in COVID cases – not reflected in official figures because testing and tracking has become unreliable – won’t subsidize any time soon.
Hospitalization rates are a more reliable metric. At London Health Sciences Center on Tuesday, there were 56 inpatients with COVID-19, an increase of 20 patients from two weeks prior. For context, the fifth-wave peak at the London hospital was 166 patients, in late January.