Amid calls to mandate masks in schools again, provincial health officials demur

Over the past few weeks, every morning has felt like "a gamble" to parent Kimberley McMann as she prepared her two kids for school. 

With many of their classmates away ill — their Edmonton school board had more than 20,000 students absent at one point last week — McMann worries about the health of eight-year-old James and four-year-old Gemma. Yet she also doesn't want to disrupt their in-person learning, nor the socialization they're getting after the past two pandemic years.

A triple threat of COVID-19 cases, a resurgence of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and earlier start to influenza season in multiple regions has pushed pediatric hospitals across the country significantly over capacity and is being blamed for a wave of absences in schools. It's also playing out against a backdrop of ongoing shortages of children's pain medication.

The situation has prompted many to question whether there is cause to reintroduce mandatory masking in Canadian classrooms — a pandemic measure that provinces and territories dropped in the first half of 2022.

School boards are looking to provincial health leaders, who aren't moving to reinstate mandates just yet.

"No one really loves wearing masks, but what is more disruptive is the idea of school going online," said McMann. 

McMann said that the parents she's spoken with "would definitely prefer to go back to mandated masks versus … the trouble we're in now and potentially having to shift to online."

"It is part of [school officials'] job to make sure that their students and staff are as safe as possible — and this is a tool we can use," she said.

Trustees at different school divisions have been raising the issue in meetings this week. In the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, there's been a call for an emergency meeting to discuss and vote on bringing back a mask mandate.

Meanwhile, Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) trustees are urging Alberta's chief medical officer of health to set clear thresholds for bringing back additional measures, such as mandatory isolation and masking, to schools experiencing outbreaks. Last week, more than three-quarters of Edmonton public schools counted student absences due to illness at 10 per cent or greater — Alberta Health Services's benchmark for outbreak status. 

"It's not just COVID. We're dealing with the flu, which is something new in the mix, well as RSV, according to medical experts. So we really do require the [chief medical officer's] guidance on what is reasonable for us to … mandate in our schools," EPSB superintendent Darrel Robertson said during a special board meeting on Tuesday.

"This issue is so divisive in the community that it makes it, practically speaking, a challenge for schools to enforce in the absence of health orders and what the chief medical officer is saying is required in schools."

To make masking mandatory again, direction must indeed come from a local public health unit or from provincial health officials, echoed Ryan Bird, spokesperson for the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), which is the country's largest school division.

"Some people would like us to require them at schools and, quite frankly, it's not enforceable … without that backing of a public health unit [or] the government of Ontario … to give it teeth," he said.