(Montreal) The Autonomous Federation of Education (FAE) on Tuesday urged the government to install air exchangers in all classrooms where ventilation is deemed inadequate.
Posted at 12:20
As the Omicron wave sweeps across the province, “air quality should be at the heart of the strategy to fight COVID-19 in schools,” the FAE pleaded in a press release.
The majority of elementary and secondary students should return to face-to-face classes next Monday. But some, including those who belong to specialized classes, returned to the school benches on January 3. Often, these are school populations who are “severely disabled and for whom compliance with the rules related, among other things, to wearing the procedural mask and physical distancing is particularly difficult, if not impossible,” argued the statement.
Only in the Montreal School Services Center, “since January 3, out of 24 classes, there are 16 which have closed due to outbreaks,” said FAE president Sylvain Mallette in an interview. telephone. Although these are circles that have to deal with particular issues, according to him these figures present a foretaste of the problems that could be found in many classes.
“Teachers have the impression that all the security measures are not there,” he said, asking that teachers have access to N95 masks.
The issue of ventilation is not new: last April, the Legault government revealed that just over half of the 15,000 classes tested had ventilation deemed satisfactory.
About 1,000 other classes had been removed from the calculation because of faulty or missing measurements, after a CBC investigation found that the testing protocol was not followed in the majority of cases studied, skewing the results. This investigation prompts the FAE to be wary of the ministry’s data for the remaining 15,000 classes.
The government then promised that CO readers2, which allow air quality to be assessed, would be installed in all classrooms before the start of the school year. This deadline was then postponed to the fall, then to mid-December.
“Today, thousands of teachers and hundreds of thousands of Quebec students are paying the price for the government’s erratic management of aeration and ventilation,” said Mr. Mallette.
The Department of Education did not immediately respond to questions from The Canadian Press.