Morinville’s Four Winds Public School will reopen for students this Nov. 4 after a COVID-19 outbreak caused it to shut its doors for six days.
Morinville and Sturgeon County families learned Oct. 28 that Four Winds Public School had canceled in-person classes from Oct. 29 to Nov. 3. All students were expected to learn from home through Google Classroom during that time.
The move came on the heels of a COVID-19 outbreak being declared at the school on Oct. 27.
In a letter to families, school principal Daniel Requa wrote that this cancellation was done after consultation with Alberta Health Services and Alberta Education with student safety in mind.
“We realize the broad implications and challenges this creates for all our families,” he wrote.
“This decision was not made lightly.”
In an interview Oct. 30, Sturgeon Public superintendent Mary Lynne Campbell said the outbreak involved three staff members, all of whom AHS said had acquired COVID-19 outside of the school. Some 67 per cent of the school’s staff had potentially come into close contact with those people, meaning they might have to isolate at home for 14 days. That meant the school didn’t have enough teachers available to do in-person classes.
AHS advised the school to switch everyone to at-home learning until Nov. 4 to give them time to do contact tracing and determine who actually was a close contact who had to isolate and get tested, Campbell said. The switch affected some 365 students and 20 staffers.
Campbell said staff and students at Four Winds (a Grade 5-9 school) wore masks and sanitized their hands regularly, and that students stuck to specific rooms as teachers moved between classes. The school was cleaned and sanitized daily and recently passed a COVID-19 audit done by provincial occupational health and safety inspectors.
AHS would contact anyone who had been a close contact with the affected staffers and tell them if they needed to isolate or get a COVID-19 test, Campbell said. Everyone else who wasn’t otherwise sick would be able to return to school on Nov. 4.
La Mission outbreak
École La Mission in St. Albert also declared an outbreak on Oct. 28.
Two students at the school had been diagnosed with COVID-19, said Marie-Josée Verret, director of school planning and monitoring for the Greater North Central Francophone school board. About 14 students and two staff members, all from the same class, were now learning from home. These people would be able to return to class in a few weeks if they tested negative for COVID-19 and showed no symptoms.
Verret said school staff cleaned and disinfected the classroom used by the students and would leave it closed until they returned. (Each student cohort has its own classroom.)
Verret said La Mission was the second school in the district to experience a COVID-19 outbreak after Edmonton’s École Père-Lacome back on Sept. 21.
Verret noted that the North Central district had stricter rules than most when it came to preventing COVID-19, such as mandatory mask use by all students, including those in Grades K-3, whenever they were not two meters apart and even during recess. (The province requires mask use in Grades 4-12 but has made masks optional in lower grades.) Classrooms at La Mission also have enough space to allow for two-meters spacing between students.
Verret thanked families for doing a great job of screening students for symptoms and keeping them home when they were sick.
“We need to keep this going, as we’re not out of the woods just yet.”
The province’s COVID-19 school status map listed 111 Alberta schools with COVID-19 outbreaks as of Oct. 30. Six of those were in the St. Albert/Sturgeon County region: Bellerose, Elmer S. Gish, Four Winds, École La Mission, Richard S. Fowler, and St. Albert Catholic High.
