Moira Baxter, Chair of School District 23 Board of Education.

Image Credit: Submitted/School District 23

After having to listen to dozens of sometimes abusive and obscene comments from the public last night, Central Okanagan school trustees have been threatened today with execution as COVID Nazis after approving a vaccine mandate for staff and trustees.

Unlike some other school districts in B.C. that have approved such mandates, the Central Okanagan trustees choose to hold their debate in public over Zoom last night, Jan. 26, where 956 people tuned in and more than 70 spoke against the mandate.

Only three spoke in favour, board chair Moira Baxter told iNFOnews.ca today.

“You all realize, in Nazi Germany, they all got executed in the end by imposing experimental medicine on people,” read an email she and other trustees received today. “Read about the Nuremberg trials. We will have Nuremburg trials in Canada soon and the COVID Nazis are going to pay for their crimes.”

There are seven other school districts in B.C. that have approved vaccine mandates for staff and 25 who have ruled against it, trustees were told by school superintendent Kevin Kaardal at the meeting.

Many, but not all of those other districts held their debates in camera, arguing they were dealing with personnel issues, Baxter said.

“We put ourselves on the line doing this in public,” she said. “There was this really concerted effort to hijack our board meeting.”

READ MORE: Kelowna school board chair may be the most harassed in B.C. by anti-vaxers

Many of those speaking were not from within the school district boundaries and trustees have been bombarded with messages from people from all over B.C. and from out of province.

Earlier in the meeting, Kaardal said that 92.3% of staff who work for the school board responded to a demand to know their vaccination status and 89.6% confirmed they were vaccinated which, he said, is higher than the adult vaccination rate in the region.

Letters of Understanding have been reached with the unions representing staff so the next step is to negotiate how the mandate will be implement and when. Baxter expects those who are not vaccinated will be given about six weeks to get vaccinated.

If they don’t, they can undergo COVID testing once a week or take an unpaid leave of absence until the agreements with the unions expire on June 30.

As for how any trustee who is not vaccinated – if there are any – will be dealt with, that has not been discussed. Baxter suggested they may have to undergo testing before attending meetings but didn’t know if there would be problems with them going into schools.

The debate also showed a strong division within the board itself, with two trustees, Amy Geistlinger and Lee-Ann Tiede, speaking strongly against the mandate and voting no to the motion.

“I have spoken to countless teachers who have said they have cried, gone home and cried and wept, because their staff rooms are such harsh places where people are constantly talking about vaccine mandates and belittling them and calling them names,” Geistlinger said late in the meeting.

She said staff opposed to the vaccine mandate were called “anti-intellectuals, misinformed, dangerous and dubious.”

“Listening to people make fun of other people for their choices – it’s discriminatory, it’s painful and it’s hurtful and it is affecting people,” Geistlinger said.

Baxter didn’t take kindly to those comments.

“I want you to think back to some of the emails that we’ve got,” Baxter said during the meeting. “I played you some of the messages I received so please, Amy Geistlinger, don’t act as if people who are supporting this are the only ones making strong statements. We have had statements that we had to report to the RCMP because of the threats and the language.

“They’ve been obscene so please do not talk to me about showing respect because we’re all at our wits end here and I would say that the lack of respect, as far as I’m concerned, has mostly come from the people who have been phoning me, emailing me, putting stuff on social media saying OK, these two trustees, just make sure you inundate them with phone calls, text messages, emails.”

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