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With schools reopening next week in the midst of COVID’s fifth wave and the highly contagious Omicron variant, no B.C. school board has yet required their staff be vaccinated.

The furthest any has gone in B.C. has been the Central Okanagan (School Board 23). It is requiring all 4,000 staff members to disclose their vaccination status by Jan. 15.

That, according to Board of Education Chair Moira Baxter, is further than any other school board has gone.

“I think we’re all entitled to know if the people we’re working with or interacting with are vaccinated,” Baxter told iNFOnews.ca. “It doesn’t make sense that we’re being told you have to have a (vaccine) passport to go to a restaurant, or cinema and those things and we have schools where we don’t even know if our staff are vaccinated or not.”

What they do with the information on vaccination status and what the consequences will be for those who don’t disclose their vaccination status remains to be seen.

READ MORE: Thompson-Okanagan school districts secretly polling teachers on COVID vaccination

“The board will have to make a decision,” Baxter said. “What are we going to do now? Are we going to say, OK, that was an exercise in futility? Or, are we going to say it’s given us some information? Is the information useful enough and important enough that we move on it and do something else?”

Baxter said two trustees, Amy Geistlinger and Lee-Ann Tiede, voted against mandatory reporting and have voted against other COVID measures in the past.

The Central Okanagan school district, as did others in the Thompson and Okanagan regions, surveyed their staff in the fall but that was voluntary and the response rate often was low.

READ MORE: All B.C. students will have to wear masks at school starting on Monday

Some senior and municipal governments have made vaccination a condition of employment, as have some employers. Those who refuse are suspended without pay then terminated.

Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has made it mandatory for health care workers to be vaccinated but has left it to school boards to make their own decisions, arguing that schools have low transmission rates.

“I think it was a real copout from the government,” Baxter said. “It must have been the government who made the decision and then got Dr. Henry to say that this is up to school boards. They didn’t leave it to individual health authorities or individual care homes. They had a policy and they refused to do that for schools. I feel that was an absolute copout. I feel they need to be accountable as to why they made that decision.”

READ MORE: B.C. school boards told to determine their own vaccine policy for staff

The B.C. Teachers’ Federation has called for a provincially imposed mandatory vaccine mandate.

But, the Central Okanagan School Teachers Association has told its members they do not have to tell the board their vaccination status even though its president has said she supports a vaccine mandate, Baxter said.

“It’s very confusing,” she said.

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