Details on new OCDSB mask mandate may not come until next week

The chair of Ottawa’s largest school board says it will take some time to determine exactly how its renewed COVID-19 mask mandate will work.

The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board voted Tuesday night to reinstate mandatory masking in schools, but questions remain about the board’s power to enforce it.

“I’m not sure we will see any clear indication of just how this will be implemented before late Thursday at the earliest, and possibly not until early next week,” board chair Lynn Scott told CTV News on Wednesday.

Eight trustees voted in favour of the motion to bring back the mandate while one trustee and the two student trustees voted against it. Three trustees abstained.

The OCDSB debated a mask mandate last month, a week before the province lifted masking rules in most settings, but it failed on a 6-6 tie. This time, it had enough support.

The move comes with COVID-19 indicators on the rise amid the sixth wave of the virus. Chief medical officer of health Dr. Kieran Moore made a ‘strong recommendation’ on Monday that people continue wearing masks, but the province is not reinstating its mask mandate.

Much of Tuesday night’s debate focused on the enforceability of such a mandate. Scott said she abstained from the vote because she didn’t have the chance to explain her rationale before the vote was called. However, she said she would have voted against it.

“The reason for that, quite simply, was the issue of how do you enforce it, and how much additional protection would such a mandate really provide?”

Even under the provincial mask mandate, schools certainly did not see 100 per cent mask use, she said. And the board has no legal authority to send children home because they are not wearing masks, she said.

“Many of the people who have reached out to me expressing their concern about this new board-imposed mask mandate have indicated that yes, they are vaccinated, they are mostly wearing masks, but what they really feel is it should be at this stage a matter of parental choice, of family choice,” she said.

Another trustee who abstained from voting said enforcement would be impossible.

“There is no upside here,” Sandra Schwartz said. “There is only more divisiveness.”

Other trustees argued a mandate will place an unnecessary burden on school staff.

“If a student comes in and says, ‘I’m not going to wear a mask,’ we can’t really do anything about it,” student trustee Charles Chen said. “Essentially the mandate is pointless and offers a false sense of security, and will place an unnecessary burden on staff, on administrators, on teachers, who will be the ones chasing people down with a mandate you can’t even enforce.”

However, trustee Mark Fisher, who brought the motion forward, said the board has a duty to provide a safe learning and working environment.

“We have a duty of care, I would argue, as a school board in providing a safe learning environment for our 70,000-plus students,” he said. Before the meeting, he told CTV News that things had changed since the initial vote last month.

“I do think the situation has changed significantly enough. I think the guidance, more than guidance from the Chief Medical Officer of Ottawa has changed, as well as the new risk assessment from Public Health Ontario I think that will sway some minds for sure,” Fisher told CTV News on Monday.

OCDSB director of education Camille Williams-Taylor told trustees that although the motion has the best of intentions, it will shift educators and administrators' focus back to enforcing COVID-19 measures.

“While we’re still navigating many COVID realities, our day-to-day focus is finally shifting back to student learning and well-being in a more normalized context,” she said. “Although he motion has the best of intentions, it will shift the focus of educators and administrators back to the implementing and enforcing of mandatory masks, although not through ministry direction, but rather through our own."

Williams-Taylor said she believes public policy on masking should come from provincial and local health authorities.

"I am very concerned that this motion is putting our staff on the front line and leaving them to manage a very divisive public health policy debate," she said.

One trustee who voted against the mask mandate called renewing the debate “highly irresponsible" and "political theatre."

“There is no way for us to enforce this," trustee Donna Blackburn told Newstalk 580 CFRA before the meeting. "That’s the advice we’ve been given, and I am not prepared to give people a false sense of security.

“People have told me flat out: ‘We don’t care what you do, we’re not going to make our kids wear a mask.” I’ve had staff say they will not be wearing a mask no matter what the board says.

“It doesn’t matter what we do. Some people will not wear masks tomorrow. Nothing will change.”

Fisher said he believes the OCDSB has the power to go above and beyond the province and mandate masks on its own.

“We had the powers last fall when we introduced a vaccine mandate and expanded a masking mandate to our younger years beyond the baseline the province put in place, and I continue to believe that we have the authority now, particularly under the Health and Safety Act,” he said.

Last month, Premier Doug Ford slammed school boards who were pushing for their own mask mandates, saying they must follow the province’s plan and aren’t “experts.”

Here is the full text of the motion trustees passed Tuesday night:

BE IT RESOLVED THAT in light of the significant increase in COVID19 cases in the City of Ottawa and impacts on employees and students, including increased staff absences and class closures, and recognizing recent statements from the Chief Medical Officer of Ottawa regarding masking in schools as means to control the spread of the virus, staff be directed to require, from an occupational health and safety perspective, mask use in all OCDSB buildings until such time as Ottawa Public Health may explicitly advise otherwise.

- with files from Jackie Perez, CTV News Ottawa