Teacher contracts virus, calls for full switch to remote learning

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This article was published 29/04/2021 (1631 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Fourteen Manitoba schools have fully switched to remote learning because of COVID-19 exposures, the province confirmed Wednesday.

Now, a Winnipeg high school teacher who tested positive for COVID-19 days before he was scheduled to be vaccinated is urging the province to move all schools to remote learning for the remainder of the school year.

Marc Giguere has been teaching for more than 30 years, more than 20 of them at Collège Jeanne-Sauvé. This past year, he said, has been the most difficult of his career. But when he was in class last Friday, instructing about 14 masked students who sit two metres apart, he didn’t yet know he’d been exposed to the virus.

“I was putting an end to a unit and looking forward to starting the next unit with my students on this upcoming Monday,” the 58-year-old English teacher said.

The students were pretty quiet, but that hasn’t been unusual during this pandemic, he said.

“Students tend to be, they’re a lot more aloof, a lot more quiet, and I get that, because they’re fed up. Everyone’s fed up,” Giguere said. “No one’s seeing the light at the end of this tunnel.”

It turned out to be his last day at school before getting tested for the virus and entering a mandatory two-week isolation period.

Giguere got his positive result Monday, six days before he was supposed to receive his first vaccine dose. That appointment has been postponed. He is confident he was exposed to the virus while he was at work, after conversations with contact tracers.

“I’m pretty healthy, so this I consider to be a minor setback, but it’s frustrating,” he said.

He said he feels he unwittingly put his family and friends at risk “simply because of a situation that was definitely beyond my control.”

Giguere said he believes the high school has been doing the best it can to reduce the risk of transmission. Class sizes have been split into smaller groups so that only half as many students are in the same room at once. Teachers, rather than whole groups of students, move from classroom to classroom. Everyone is spaced apart, and desks are wiped down between cohorts. Students are sent out of school for lunch, and they — along with school staff — are required to wear masks at all times.

Still, the precautions haven’t been enough, Giguere said. He acknowledged remote learning is not always effective, and works better for some students than for others, but he said he believes it’s the option Manitoba should adopt now, with six to eight weeks left in the school year.

“There’s tons and tons of factors to consider in this. Nothing is easy, but at the end of the day, it is my personal belief that obviously, even though it may not be the best solution, it is still the correct solution at this point. Yes, there are only six weeks left, but at the same time, if more and more people are going to get sick over the next few weeks, and you can pretty much bet that that will be the case… better to act now,” Giguere said.

Not everyone agrees a complete switch to remote learning is the best thing to do in Manitoba’s third wave. Provincial health officials have said the virus is not being significantly transmitted within schools, but children and teens are increasingly contracting the virus at household gatherings and non-school activities.

Prioritizing teachers for vaccines would be a big help, several school officials told the Free Press.

About 70 per cent of teachers in Seven Oaks School Division are eligible to be vaccinated after criteria were expanded to include more Winnipeg neighbourhoods this week, said superintendent Brian O’Leary.

“That’s tremendously helpful,” he said. As more teachers get vaccinated, he said he hopes schools can remain open for the rest of the year, especially since most of the virus’s spread happens out of schools.

“If kids aren’t in school, it doesn’t mean they’re safer than when they are,” O’Leary said. “I think schools have done well, and hopefully we can continue to navigate through the next month, and hopefully things get better.”

The division hasn’t moved any of its schools to remote learning, but has routinely done so for individual classrooms.

No schools in Winnipeg School Division, the city’s largest, had moved entirely to remote learning as of Wednesday. Two schools in Pembina Trails division are online only. École St. Avila and École South Pointe School in Winnipeg will temporarily switch to remote learning in the coming days and are expected to return to in-class instruction May 17, the division said.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay