Time for BSD to be more transparent

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/12/2021 (1732 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In early May 2020, a Brandon Sun reporter had been attempting for days to confirm rumours that the COVID-19 virus had finally shown up in the Wheat City, after weeks of enduring news reports about its spread elsewhere in the world — including Winnipeg.

Eventually, we learned that a cluster of cases had been found at the Brandon terminal of Winnipeg-based Paul’s Hauling and Oak Point Service, a company that did all it could to work with the province to clean up the situation and ensure the safety of its workers and clients.

These were the early days of the pandemic, and after hearing so little factual information about the spread of the virus from the province — such as community names and locations — local residents seemed almost bemused by all the commotion. Until COVID-19 actually arrived, that is, along with the rumours.

As I stated in an editorial on May 7 of that year, COVID-19 may well have already been circulating in the city for several weeks — we had no way of knowing due to the provincial government’s then restrictive and questionable policy of offering little to no detail about the locations of where the virus had been found.

And that lack of provincial transparency added to the concerns of local residents who were hearing — and spreading — all kinds of rumours about which businesses had been affected.

“Was it a processing plant like Maple Leaf or HyLife?” I wrote. “Was it within the health-care system — after all, the province said the cluster fell within the ‘Prairie Mountain Health region.’”

This past week, the spread of the omicron variant of COVID-19 feels a bit like déjà vu, harking back to the early days of the pandemic and the initial wave of the virus. Only this time, the province has been somewhat more forthcoming with information by comparison — the end of contact tracing by the Stefanson government notwithstanding.

Instead, it’s the Brandon School Division that has shown a continued reluctance to keep the broader community aware of the latest movement of the new variants within schools.

Early Friday evening, I received a message from a friend — a fellow parent of an elementary-school-aged child from another school — noting an email from the BSD that had been sent to “families and staff” within the division.

The email from Supt. Mathew Gustafson started off by stating that the province is increasing its rapid test kit supply “to provide free voluntary rapid antigen tests for students in kindergarten to Grade 6.” It continued with multiple bullet points noting information about the test kits, thoroughly reading like a simple policy update.

Toward the end of the first page, the letter then referenced the total number of cases of COVID-19 of school-aged children and/or staff, again accompanied by bullet points.

It was only by the second full paragraph of the second page did the letter state that the division had been informed of a case of the omicron variant in a Brandon school. To paraphrase a former editor who critiqued a story I once wrote — he buried the lede (the most important information).

Blink, and you miss it. Thankfully, we didn’t.

For a large part of the weekend, we began receiving tips about the fact that letters had gone out to parents of a particular school in which a case of omicron had been verified. And then, there was another school. By Sunday morning, it was three schools. And then by Sunday afternoon, possibly a fourth case.

To be fair, we give full credit to Supt. Mathew Gustafson, who spoke with a Sun reporter on Sunday and verified first the three cases and named the affected elementary schools. He also returned another call later that day to confirm that there was potentially a fourth case — this time at a high school. He was open with the Sun, and we are glad he took the time to help us make sure that our information was accurate.

Yet that welcome candour was somewhat out of character for the division administration these days. Recall that due to concerns over privacy raised by a few parents and teachers regarding the division’s previous practice of posting public notices of identified COVID cases to its website as a community service, the BSD abruptly ended such postings last October. And in our conversations with Supt. Gustafson over the weekend, he reiterated that the school division does not have any plans to change that policy, even with the ongoing spread of omicron.

I again suggest that the division is making an error in judgment here. The only way to dispel misinformation and put a wrench in the rumour mill is to provide the public with clear, factual information — not just parents, but the community at large.

Letters going to parents are still leaking out to the public, whether it be via Facebook group posts or through cellphone messages — and the information then becomes public anyway. Who’s to stop some unscrupulous individual from fabricating a letter and posting it to a public group somewhere, thus putting false information out to the public? Thankfully, the Sun makes every attempt to verify such letters with the school division, but we can’t be everywhere, nor catch everything.

As a parent, I again ask the school division to reconsider this ill-advised decision. The public is better off knowing when and where this faster and more virulent omicron variant moves. Providing that information is a public service — one that the school division needs to reinstate.

» Matt Goerzen, editor