Education Minister Adriana LaGrange to provide update on return to school
CBC
Alberta Education Minister Adriana LaGrange will provide an update on the plan for the return to school for students in kindergarten to Grade 12 Thursday evening.
You can watch it live here at 5:30 p.m. MT.
Several other provinces have delayed the return to class or moved to online learning, in the wake of rising COVID-19 cases driven by the Omicron variant.
Some parents who spoke to CBC before Thursday's news conference were hoping the province will increase COVID-19 precautions as case numbers across Alberta soar.
"Please, we beg of you – do something," said Fraser Porter, whose son is in Grade 2 at Oliver School in downtown Edmonton.
Porter is the chairperson for the school's parent council, and said that the existing cloth masks and the daily symptom checklist just aren't going to cut it with Omicron spreading.
"It's not acceptable to just walk into this without deploying additional resources and technologies to protect our families and our schools," she said.
She said her council wants to see more rapid testing and better air filtration in schools, as well as smaller class sizes and more staff.
"They need to act before we return to school, not react after we have thousands of infections among young, vulnerable children," she said, adding that teachers and support staff are also at risk.
There were an estimated 4,000 cases of COVID-19 reported in Alberta on Thursday, shattering the previous daily record of 2,775 cases set on Wednesday.
In an update on Twitter Thursday, Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw announced she was meeting with cabinet officials about the latest development with the omicron variant, and that the planned news conference would be moved to Friday.
Porter said if the government doesn't announce new measures to address the spread of COVID-19 in schools, it leaves parents in a terrible situation.
"I am uncomfortable sending my child to school, but what am I to do? I have to work, I can't take an extended leave of absence from my job – they need me too. We're caught between two worlds," she said.
Brandi Rai, president of the Alberta School Councils Association, has been hearing from many parents torn about what to do. She said the lack of information is frustrating.
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