COVID outbreak hits Lethbridge School Division
By Lethbridge Herald on March 15, 2021.
Lethbridge School Division superintendent Cheryl Gilmore is seen in this file photo. Herald file photo by Ian Martens
@IMartensHeraldTim Kalinowski
Lethbridge Herald
tkalinowski@lethbridgeherald.com
With 47 students and staff members diagnosed with COVID-19, and with about 80 teachers and 1,000 other students in quarantine, the Lethbridge School Division is struggling to keep some classes functioning even with a pivot option to online learning in play, admitted LSD Superintendent of Schools Cheryl Gilmore. The outbreaks have led to a shortage of educational assistants, and in one case at Galbraith Elementary, Gilmore confirmed, a general shortage of teaching staff has led to Grades K-2 being in school one week and Grades 3-5 the next. Wilson Middle School has also moved all Grade 8 students to online learning as it deals with an outbreak there.
Currently there are two schools on outbreak status, Wilson Middle School and Winston Churchill High School, and one on “alert” status, Ecole Agnes Davidson. In total about 14 Lethbridge public schools have reported cases of the COVID-19 among students, the division confirms.
The transmissions are not happening within the schools themselves, stated Gilmore, but are a result of family and other social gatherings outside of the school environment.
The recent alarming rise in school cases, (the most the division has experienced since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic last year), parallels what is happening in the broader community with 447 cases city-wide, putting Lethbridge firmly within the Alberta Health Services most severe outbreak category.
Gilmore said the division was not contemplating school closures at this time, but admitted it is up to the province to take that action should they deem it necessary. The province recently ordered the close of St. Francis School in the Holy Spirit Separate School Division, for example, with rising COVID numbers there, said Gilmore.
“A jurisdiction doesn’t make that decision on its own,” she explained. “At this point in time, when we talk about 45 cases, and we have 12,000 students. For all of those students who have chosen to be in school, and those parents who anticipate their children will be in school, it isn’t always necessarily what’s easy. Because even though we have 1,000 students at home, we have another 10,000 in school. And so for those parents, those families, and certainly we will always make the best decision in the interests of health and safety– if any school ever gets to a level where we believe that there’s not safe level of staff in the school or if it gets so delivery is not effectively delivered, or it gets to the point where there is transmission happening in schools– but that is just not the case (right now).”
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11-10
Cycled by two schools (one JH, the other HS, last week, no one including staff wearing masks. Why is this?