Please direct media inquiries to:
Wing Li (she/her)
Communications Director
E: [email protected]

Support Our Students (SOS) Alberta is urgently calling on the Alberta government to reinstate public health contact tracing for schools, which was eliminated by a change in provincial guidelines. With this change, schools will no longer receive notifications from Alberta Health Services regarding positive test cases or exposures. Public health will not step in until at least 10% of a school population is absent. This is an utter abdication of government duty especially as the school year has started amid rapidly rising cases of highly transmissible Delta variant.
 
Last year (2020/21), families relied heavily on contact tracing to know when/if students were exposed at school. During a public health crisis, having open and transparent knowledge is necessary for decision-making at the individual and community level.
 
Because of government’s withdrawal of school-based contact tracing, the scarcity of case notifications is preventing SOS Alberta from continuing our COVID-19 School Tracker in the same consistent format as last year. Our School Tracker was updated every day. It was viewed over 4 million times by over 430,000 Albertans. This speaks to the huge public demand for transparent and up-to-date school case information.
 
However, after one week of school in session, current available data is so insufficient that our community sources simply do not have adequate data to provide. Furthermore, we reiterate unequivocally that it is the job of government to provide this essential tracking protocol as they have the centralized resources and infrastructure administered by public funds. By withholding case statistics, the government is creating a massive information black hole and throwing families into even more tumultuous uncertainty.
 
“After 18 months of this pandemic, the AB government still refuses to prioritize safer schools and have now withdrawn even the basic tool of contact tracing for schools. Parents & guardians need to know if their child was exposed to a highly contagious disease to make complex decisions for their families in an informed and proactive manner. The government is disempowering families by withholding information.”
- Medeana Moussa, Executive Director of Support Our Students
 
While SOS Alberta cannot continue with our daily COVID-19 School Tracker due to this dearth of information, we will continue to support Alberta families by monitoring the province-wide school situation however we can.
 
Support Our Students (SOS) Alberta is a non-profit citizens’ action group advocating for universally accessible and equitable public education in Alberta.  www.supportourstudents.ca
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Media Inquiries:
Contact Wing Li (She/her) at [email protected]
 
 
 
 

Support Our Students (SOS) Alberta, with support from Alberta Federation of Labour, have released an easy-to-use letter writing tool at www.safeschoolsAB.ca for parents and community members to write to their provincial Member of Legislative Assembly or School Board Trustee. With school starting in less than two weeks, Alberta’s students need Swiss-cheese layers of protection to ensure equitable and safe access to education. Moreover, education workers should be protected in their workplaces. Rapidly rising cases of COVID-19 in the province, especially of the Delta variant, and low vaccination rates threaten the sustainability of in-person learning. Combined with the fact that children under 12 are not yet eligible for vaccination, government must prioritize mitigation of spread and infection in schools. We must avoid the same tumultuous roller coaster of school closures that we witnessed last school year.
 
The online tool will be available for Albertans throughout the province, featuring a database of all MLAs, and every public, separate and francophone school board trustees and superintendents.

The tool will generate letters demanding the provincial government:

1) Reinstate Re-instate Alberta Health Services notification, contact tracing, and reporting of school cases (including open reporting of outbreaks in schools)
2) Implement province-wide mandatory masking for pre-K to Grade 12
3) Directly fund portable filtration units and CO2 monitors to assess air quality in classrooms

Also, the tool will generate letters requesting school boards to:
1) Implement mandatory masking for pre-K to Grade 12
2) Install portable filtration units (plus ventilation assessments as previous guidelines pre-date COVID-19 pandemic)
3) Maintain cohorting and physical distancing

“Through years of chronic underfunding, plus deferred infrastructure updates, Alberta’s public schools need to be equipped with immediate and long-term mitigation measures to ensure every student can access a safe learning environment. The prolonged COVID-19 pandemic has amplified education inequities and now more than ever we need to prioritize students.” – Medeana Moussa, Executive Director, Support Our Students

“The Kenney government is abdicating its responsibility to protect students and education staff in the fourth wave of the pandemic. That’s why we’re supporting SOS with this new online tool. We simply can’t allow 400,000 of our unvaccinated kids to go back to school without adequate protections. Albertans need to demand leadership and funding from the province. And if the province is going to persist in downloading responsibility to school boards, then we need to make sure trustees know what needs to be done: and that means mandatory masking; and CO2 monitors and air filtration in every classroom.” - Gil McGowan, President, Alberta Federation of Labour
 
Support Our Students Alberta is a non-profit citizens’ action group advocating for universally accessible and equitable public education in Alberta. 

Alberta Federation of Labour is the largest worker advocacy group in Alberta, representing approximately 170,000 workers from 29 affiliated unions.

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​Following Premier Kenney’s announcement this afternoon that Alberta K-12 students will return to in-person classes January 11th, Support Our Students Alberta is extremely concerned about the actual sustainability of learning. We are equally concerned for the health and safety of students and education workers in the coming weeks. Premier Kenney failed to announce much-needed resources to maintain school stability in the current pandemic context. Given this, we believe this decision is politically biased, and fails to properly centre the real needs of students (physical, mental, developmental) for sustained, safe learning. They are being sent back without sufficient risk mitigation. Kenney DID NOT use the time since Nov. 30 when Gr 7-12 went online to prepare an evidence-based plan to avoid the roller coaster of quarantines, contact tracing collapse, and escalation of school cases we witnessed in the fall. 
 
“Despite having an additional six weeks to improve supports for schools, Premier Kenney is choosing to forge ahead with the same non-plan for schools they have had since the start of this pandemic.” - Medeana Moussa, Executive Director, SOS Alberta
 
The lack of adequate transparency of school cases and in-school transmission data to the public have bred a high level of general distrust and confusion in this announcement. This announcement, lacking in vision and preparedness, is another example of dangerously undisciplined policy-making that further erodes public trust in Kenney’s duty to protect Alberta students & Albertans in general.
 
 
Support Our Students (SOS) Alberta is a non-profit citizens’ action group advocating for universally accessible and equitable public education in Alberta.  www.supportourstudents.ca
 
Please direct inquiries related to this statement to Wing Li, Communications Director.
 
-30-

Monday, November 16, 2020         
For Immediate Release                        
    
Demanding students write standard exams in a non-standard year shows complete disregard for the impact COVID19 is having on our education system
 
Standardized exams are structured so all test takers answer the same questions under the same conditions. But clearly, conditions are not standard this year. The pandemic has caused significant disruption to learning environments. Support Our Students and RAD Educators Network jointly call for the cancellation of both Provincial Achievement Tests and Diploma exams for all students this year. 
 
There is a vast disparity, province-wide, in students’ learning environments; almost 30% of students in Edmonton Public are registered in at-home learning compared to 18% in CBE;  some high schools have condensed learning time by shifting to quarterly semesters while others have remained unadjusted. In addition, thousands of students have had to isolate for weeks at a time, further disrupting their education. COVID-19 case numbers, school closures and transitions to Scenario 3 (at-home learning) are increasing throughout Alberta, the situation shows no sign of abating. 
 
Placing the onus of standardized exam continuation on school boards and students creates further inconsistency and compounds the issue. This needs to be a centralized decision, the Minister of Education needs to definitively cancel standardized exams. 
 
Medeana Moussa, Executive Director of Support Our Students says “[i]t is nonsensical for the Minister of Education to refuse to adjust for the widespread disruption to learning in this pandemic school year. It is irresponsible to forge ahead as though students' learning hasn’t been impacted, and continue to allocate money to standardized tests when funding for education is scarce. Alberta students deserve a definitive cancellation of PATs and Diplomas this year.” 
 
RAD Educators Network believes “Standardized tests measure privilege more than academic achievement. An over reliance on these exams risks creating a narrowed curriculum instead of encouraging critical and creative thinking throughout a student's learning. Good teacher observation, documentation of student work, and performance-based assessment, provide a much more accurate metric of student learning outcomes. We call for the Minister of Education to cancel standardized tests full stop.”
 
Support Our Students Alberta is a non profit citizens action group advocating for universally accessible and equitable public education in Alberta.  www.supportourstudents.ca

The RAD Educators Network is a collective of educators (teachers, professors, researchers, activists, early-childhood educators, etc.) from across Alberta who are working for equity and social justice education.  www.medium.com


Please direct inquiries to:
SOS Alberta: Wing Li, Communications Director.  Email: [email protected]    
RAD Educators Network: Cathryn van Kessel,  Twitter: @RADEducators  Email: [email protected]
                        

​

Support Our Students (SOS) Alberta welcomes today's belated announcement from the Government of Alberta on the launch of a COVID-19 school tracking website. SOS calls on the government to report data on the full impact of COVID on the school community, including the number of isolated staff and students. Following reports of hundreds of staff and students isolated for 14 days after only a few days of school, Albertan families are owed transparency on the full extent of disruption caused by COVID-19 in our schools, as this disruption has a direct impact on their lives and livelihoods.
 
“That, after six months of preparation of a ‘robust’ plan, the Government of Alberta was not prepared to offer Albertans a trusted source of COVID-19 school information in time for school re-entry truly highlights how little this government understands the concerns of parents and how little effort they invested in preparation. The public demand for this information from a trusted source was eminently foreseeable,” explained Medeana Moussa, Executive Director of Support Our Students.
 
In lieu of an official source of information, and in anticipation of parent demand for a trusted source, SOS launched its own COVID-19 tracking website prior to the first day of school. SOS recognized the realities of how Alberta families exist in both their school and neighbourhood communities, how those communities can be different yet overlapping. SOS understands the concerns of parents whose children may go to schools outside their communities, such as interacting with children in neighbourhood playgrounds. For these reasons in the first four days of operation, SOS’s COVID-19 tracker was visited over 48,000 times. Albertans have come to trust the SOS COVID-19 tracker as a timely and reliable source; SOS will continue to operate its own tracker until the Government can demonstrate a comparable degree of timeliness, completeness, and credibility. 
 
SOS adds schools/updates to our tracker if an official communication by a school, school authority, or AHS has been made to the school community, or reported by a reputable media source. The SOS tracker makes no inferences or assumptions about the events, simply tallies them and provides access to the confirmed communication.
 
Support Our Students (SOS) Alberta is a non profit citizens’ action group advocating for universally accessible and equitable public education in Alberta.  www.supportourstudents.ca
 

For immediate release: 
September 2, 2020
 
Support Our Students calls on the provincial government to invest the funding from the federal government for safe openings into supporting smaller class sizes in Alberta public schools. We also call for detailed accountability of how the funds are allocated and transferred to school divisions.
 
Smaller class sizes will allow for greater physical distancing and will result in higher quality education. The evidence is clear that physical distancing of 2 metres is critical to minimize the spread of COVID-19 in schools and in the wider community.
 
Medeana Moussa, Executive Director of Support Our Students explains that “persistent underfunding of public schools in Alberta has resulted in over crowded classrooms. This has always been a concern from a student learning perspective but now, in a pandemic, this neglect of our public schools is exacerbated and magnified as an emergent health issue. The Alberta government has a responsibility to use these funds to make the return to school safer for our students, our teachers and our communities while improving the quality of education and addressing this long standing problem.”
 
COVID-19 has widened the gap between high and low income families and has had the same disproportionate impact on students. Many families do not have the option to stay at home and engage in online learning. It is effective and equitable to invest this federal money in making schools physically safe for all in a way that will have a lasting impact on Alberta’s education system. 
 
The Federal government announced $2 billion in support for provinces and territories last week through the Safe Return to Class Fund. Alberta will receive a maximum allotment of $264.84M in two installments, the first in September 2020 and the second in the early part of 2021. This funding would represent the most government funds Alberta schools have received during this health crisis.
 
Support Our Students Alberta is a non profit citizens action group advocating for universally accessible and equitable public education in Alberta.  www.supportourstudents.ca