Sask. School Boards Association president discusses new isolation rules

COVID-19 contact tracing won’t be as much of a workload for Saskatchewan teachers and school staff now that new rules around isolation have kicked in.

The province announced Thursday that a few new changes would start Friday.

For one, close contacts of positive cases no longer need to isolate. Parents also don’t have to report positive cases to schools for contact tracing purposes.

According to Shawn Davidson, the president of the Saskatchewan School Boards Association, that kind of work has been a stress on staff members.

“We’ve been doing it to a degree all along through the pandemic, but over the course of the last month here in particular … the onus has really fallen on school division administration to do all of that work,” Davidson told Gormley on Friday.

“We’ve been saying all along that we’re not health experts (and) we really don’t have the capacity to do all that work … This, obviously, changes that fairly considerably.

“We’ve followed the advice of our medical health officials. That’s what was required of us. We have certainly stepped up to the challenge and have done that work.”

He said the association has always gone along with what the health experts are saying, and that this is no different.

“Obviously, the health folks feel that this is the best route. This is the recommendation that they’ve made, and so we’re certainly going to work with that,” he continued.

He also pointed out the new rules are much more simple across the board.

“It certainly simplifies the messaging for parents, families and for schools. It takes a fairly simple approach that we’ve been saying all along: ‘If you’re sick, stay home. If you’re not feeling well, make sure you take a test. If it’s positive, you have to isolate,’ ” Davidson said.

The four largest school divisions in Saskatchewan’s two largest cities said after Thursday’s announcement that changes were being made to the way they handled and reported COVID cases.

One of those changes involved stopping the process of notifying parents about positive cases in schools.

Davidson said many teachers, students and staff members have had to miss class or switch to remote learning in the past month due to COVID cases.

“We’ve said all along that we believe that the best learning takes place with students in classrooms, and we continue to maintain that position,” he said.

But that doesn’t mean he’s throwing caution to the wind.

“Of course, we want to do that in as safe as possible a fashion, and we rely on our medical health officials to give us direction on that,” he said.