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First Student school bus (photo by Liam Verster)
By Shane Clausing
schools debate mask mandate

GPPSD to discuss mask mandate; GPCSD continuing with back-to-school plan

Sep 9, 2021 | 6:00 AM

Following the Alberta government’s decision to implement a province-wide mask mandate for indoor public spaces on September 3 aimed at slowing the spread of COVID-19, school divisions throughout the province are wrestling with whether or not their students should be mandated to wear masks or not.

While there is a province-wide mask mandate in place for all indoor businesses and facilities, school divisions are allowed to decide for themselves whether masks are needed.

Grande Prairie Public School Division (GPPSD) Board Chair John Lehners tells EverythingGP with new daily cases climbing in the city, the board felt it was important to take another look at potentially implementing a mandate.

“We had a vote about two weeks ago and decided that it didn’t make sense to implement a mandatory plan,” said Lehners. “But since then the government has raised the bar a little bit and have left it up to school boards to decide if they want to introduce masks while the public in general needs to mask up in public settings.

“We will be looking at that next Tuesday to decide if we want to change that position or not.”

Regardless of the outcome of the debate at Tuesday’s meeting, Lehners says there will be questions from both sides. However, he adds they’ll look at all the data they can in order to make informed decisions.

“There’s a lot of information that needs to be considered when looking at it, so we need to look at that on Tuesday,” he said.

Meantime, Grande Prairie and District Catholic Schools board chair Michael Ouelette says they are continuing it monitor the COVID-19 situation. He adds they will continue to follow the guidance of the provincial government at this time.

“What we are doing is staying with our original back to school plan, with all enhanced hand sanitizers, and giving the children and teachers the option to try and social distance and that stuff,” he explained.

“At this present time we are monitoring it very closely and we are not debating if we’ll be going into a mask (mandate), it’s not on the agenda.”

While they do have the option to debate implementing a mask mandate, Lehners adds he’s disappointed the provincial government isn’t taking a lead on making masks mandatory across all schools as they did with other indoor facilities throughout the province.

“I can tell you we are definitely a little frustrated with the government not making the call on that. We were hoping they would’ve come across and included the schools. We are hearing it from both sides from parents,” he said.

“We have parents contacting us who are very supportive of masks, but we also have the parents on the other side who are against children wearing the masks. We are staying with our back-to-school plan we started first of September.”

Masks continue to be mandatory on school buses for all divisions across the province.

At this time, there are no COVID-19 outbreaks at schools within Grande Prairie. The City of Grande Prairie had 505 active COVID-19 cases as of September 7.

by Shane Clausing