Edmonton Catholic Schools Reinstating Mask-Mandates, Waiting For Provincial Guidance

The Edmonton Catholic school board will be reinstating the policy of having children wear masks in school this fall, despite the province having removed the vast majority of mask mandates in the province. 

Along with reinstating mandatory masks in the Edmonton Catholic school division, they are also putting back in place screening protocols, as well as enhanced cleaning practices that they had implemented back in 2020.

The Catholic school divisions spokeswoman Christine Meadows said that they expected to get further guidance from the province in mid-August, which will direct their back-to-school plans for students in September. 

Other Alberta school districts are still working on making their own back-to-school plans but no other district has yet announced that it would be mandated masks again until the province provides guidance. 

It seems quite odd that the Edmonton Catholic School Board is assuming that a mask mandate is at all appropriate seeing as nothing that the province has done since eliminating all the mask mandates, and other lockdown restrictions, would indicate in any way that students would be expected to mask-up again when returning to the classroom.

The school board seems to be trying to put their decision on masks in schools onto the provinces by waiting for their guidance to avoid criticism, rather than just doing the responsible thing and following the trend in Alberta and removing the mandates themselves.

Children were never at significant risk of being harmed by COVID-19, and masks in school have been repeatedly criticized as harmful to children’s social development, but the Edmonton Catholic School Board still considers it too much of a political risk to do the right thing in this scenario and instead wants the provincial UCP government to make the decision to remove the mask mandates for them. 

Alberta, despite how much the media is agonizing over infection numbers, has been completely flat when it comes to deaths due to COVID-19 over the past few weeks, with most days reporting 0 deaths and at most 2 on occasion. 

Anyone who wanted a vaccine has gotten one and it should be clear by now that, just as Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Chief Medical Officer Deena Hinshaw have been saying like Republican officials in the United States, at some point we all have to learn to live with the virus cause zero-COVID can never be achieved.