Grade 1 student Mayelle Stanley, six, swings in the playground at Armstrong Elementary School, in this file photo from March 17, 2021.

Image Credit: Ben Bulmer

Armstrong Elementary School will be closed for two days due to staff shortages after a handful of teachers at the school refused to go to work due to the extremely high number of children in their classes not wearing masks.

In some classes around one-third of all pupils are not wearing masks saying they have an exemption.

A Jan. 13 North Okanagan–Shuswap School District No. 83 press release says the school will be "functionally closed" due to a shortage of staff on Jan. 14 and Jan. 17.

The school district does not say the closure is caused by teachers' refusing to work, however North Okanagan-Shuswap Teachers Association president Graham Gomme said more than four teachers from Armstrong Elementary had filed a refusal for unsafe work claim through WorkSafeBC.

"These teachers are feeling very vulnerable," Gomme told iNFOnews.ca. "Anybody in this situation would be feeling this way."

Gomme wouldn't give precise numbers but said it was "more than four" teachers that had refused to work.

He said the Kindergarten to Grade 5 school had roughly 300 students and more than 40 students had mask exemptions.

The percentage of mask exemptions is far higher than in other North Okanagan–Shuswap School District No. 83 schools.

Gomme said Shuswap Middle School has 650 students and only six mask exemptions, while Sorrento Elementary School has roughly 220 students and only four mask exemptions.

The Teachers Association president said when legitimate exemptions made up around one per cent of the population the numbers at Armstrong Elementary didn't add up.

He said one Armstrong Elementary teacher contracted COVID last summer and still had not returned to work because of the illness.

"You have to understand the psychology of that particular school with this number of students that are unmasked, is very tenuous... they're a very nervous bunch because they had a colleague that almost died from COVID," Gomme said.

Shortly before the school confirmed it was closing, Gomme said he'd heard the school was finding it difficult to fill the absent teachers' positions with substitute teachers.

School District 83 Superintendent Donna Kriger did not immediately return our call for comment on the situation but a post to the school's website Jan. 7, said: "masks remain an integral part of the safety protocol for COVID-19."

"A very small number of masking exemptions apply according to the Public Health Order," reads the post.

According to the post, parents need to fill out an exemption form and discuss the matter with the school's principal. Pupils do not need a doctor's letter for a mask exemption.

Gomme said he's just trying to protect the teachers that he represents.

"This is not a fight against parents we're just pleading that everyone pitch in and work together to make it safer there," he said. "I don't want to see schools closed I don't want to see a subpar education because of this pandemic."

Gomme said he was "perplexed" by the situation.

"I thought people would be understanding of each other. I didn't see this kind of conflict... I understand their argument I just don't understand that this is the place to do it at this point in time," he said.

— This story was updated 8:38 a.m Friday, January 2022, to correct the spelling of Graham Gomme's surname.

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