As Sask. changes rules on reporting positive COVID-19 cases to schools, parents feel 'thrown to the wolves'
CBC
As the Saskatchewan government pivots away from having parents report positive COVID-19 tests to their children's schools, some parents they're left feeling in the dark about the state of the pandemic in the province.
The change in policy announced on Thursday means no more contact tracing in schools and the end of daily reporting to parents.
Prior to the announcement, parents were told to report positive rapid tests to their school administrators.
The administrators would then pass that information along to other parents, informing them about classroom cases or situations where their child may have been a close contact while at school. That is no longer happening.
Many parents said they used the information to decide whether to send their children to school.
For Jessalyn Murphy, a mother to a four-year-old daughter who is unable to get vaccinated and a five-year-old son with Type 1 Diabetes, the provincial government's decision was the final straw.
"It seems like we've been thrown to the wolves. I don't know what we're going to do for next week," Murphy told CBC News in a phone interview.
Because of his health condition, Murphy's five-year-old is considered especially vulnerable to COVID-19.
As a result, she's kept him out of his kindergarten class since school resumed earlier this month in hopes of avoiding the ongoing Omicron surge in Saskatchewan.
Murphy said she's been using the daily notifications she gets about cases of COVID-19 at the school to assess whether its safe to send her son back into class.
"Now they've taken away the only tool we had to assess that risk, by removing the requirement to report positive cases," she said.
"So now we have no way to know if there may be cases in the classroom."
The news has received a mixed reaction from the organization representing more than 13,500 education workers across the province.
Patrick Maze, president of the Saskatchewan Teachers' Federation (STF), said that some of the organization's members are frustrated by the decision.
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