Stay updated with breaking news from Laurel macpherson. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
The Kamloops-Thompson Teachers’ Association would prefer a B.C.-wide mandate, as opposed to a patchwork of school districts with different rules. The BC Teachers’ Federation also supports a vaccine mandate for school staff ....
SD73 reaches agreement with unions to stretch out spring breaks to two weeks starting next year - Kamloops News castanet.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from castanet.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The agreement comes after surveys in previous year showed an overwhelming majority of parents and teachers favoured the two-week break over the one-year break in place locally. At issue was how to add legislated instruction hours to the school year that would be lost to an extra week of spring break. The district did have a three-year window between 2015 and 2017 in which there was a two-week spring break. The district returned to a one-week break in 2018. At the time, the district said merging Easter and the break was one of the options on which staff and teachers could not agree. ....
The province first announced on March 18 that teachers would be vaccinated under its essential worker program. But that plan was changed multiple times as the province repurposed its AstraZeneca supply and made changes to eligibility. Teachers, among other groups, were left in the dark about when they may be getting the shot. Recent efforts to vaccinate teachers in the province have been primarily in the Lower Mainland, at hot spots in the Vancouver Coastal and Fraser health regions. Even now, as Interior Health promised to send information to the school district, skepticism remains. We re not holding our breath on this one because, in April, we heard there was going to be priority vaccinations for K-12, but nothing materialized, Macpherson said. ....
But some, including the B.C. Teachers Federation (BCTF) and the Kamloops-Thompson Teachers Association (KTTA), think now is not the time for such tests. There was nothing normal about the last school year or the one we are currently in,” BCTF president Teri Mooring wrote in a statement to parents. “Teachers, students and families have been forced to constantly adjust to changing rules and conditions.” KTTA president Laurel Macpherson agreed. She called it very unfortunate how the data is used, pointing to rankings created by Lower Mainland think tank, the Fraser Institute. Each year, the organization rates each school in the province out of 10 and provides a ranking using publicly available data from the FSA tests. ....