Teachers' union urging Quebec to install air purifiers in poorly ventilated classrooms

Quebec's major teachers union federation (FAE) is urging the government to install air purifiers in all classrooms where ventilation is deemed inadequate.

As the Omicron variant wave sweeps the province, "air quality should be at the heart of the strategy to combat COVID-19 in schools," the FAE said in a news release.

The majority of primary and secondary students are expected to return to face-to-face classes on Jan. 17.

But some, including those in specialized classes for students with disabilities, returned to school as early as Jan. 3.

Often, these are school populations that are "heavily handicapped and for whom compliance with rules related to, among other things, the wearing of procedural masks and physical distancing is particularly difficult, if not impossible," the release said.

In Montreal's school services centre alone, "since January 3, 16 of the 24 classes have been closed because of outbreaks," said FAE president Sylvain Mallette in a telephone interview.

While the settings in question come with unique issues, he said the numbers are a taste of the problems that could be found in many classrooms.

"Teachers feel that not all safety measures are in place," he said, calling for teachers to have access to N95 masks.

The ventilation issue is not new.

Last April, the Legault government revealed that just over half of the 15,000 classrooms tested had satisfactory ventilation.

About 1,000 other classrooms were removed from the calculation because of faulty or missing measurements, after a Radio-Canada investigation revealed that the testing protocol was not followed in the majority of cases studied, distorting the results. The investigation led the FAE to be suspicious of the department's data for the remaining 15,000 classrooms.

The government promised that CO2 readers, which measure air quality, would be installed in all classrooms before the start of the school year. This deadline was then pushed back to the fall and then to mid-December.

"Today, thousands of teachers and hundreds of thousands of students in Quebec are paying the price for the government's erratic management of ventilation and air quality," said Mallette.

-- This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Jan. 11, 2022.