New Brunswick’s education minister is clarifying new measures to help keep COVID-19 out of schools and daycares.
A letter sent to parents Monday night said any students, staff, volunteers or their family members who return from international travel will have to avoid schools, district offices and early learning facilities for 14 days.
During a news conference Tuesday afternoon, Education and Early Childhood Development Minister Dominic Cardy said there have been some concerns when it comes to cross-border travel to Maine.
“We are not insisting that people who live in Woodstock — to use a community that’s close to my heart — that they don’t go across to buy milk in Houlton, that they don’t go to work in Houlton and vice versa,” said Cardy.
The minister also noted the policy only applies to travellers, so if a parent went south and left their child at home, the child would still able to go to school.
Cardy said the new measures are designed to help protect some of the province’s most vulnerable populations.
The minister said they are working on mechanisms to keep educating students who are stuck at home.
“Some of them are already in place. We’ve had experiences in the past where school has been closed for several days because of weather … [there are] homework assignments that are given either electronically or in paper-form by teachers,” said Cardy.
“I heard some really interesting ideas around using community television stations, for example, to broadcast lectures, things like that.”
Cardy said they are relying on a level of “social trust” for the new measures to be effective.
“This, again, is not me standing here as education minister pretending that I’m wearing a policeman’s outfit. The goal here is to call on New Brunswickers and say ‘look, this is a difficult situation, this is a dangerous disease, you do not want to be the person that brings this virus back to New Brunswick,'” he said.
Cardy said he does not think the virus will lead to school closures at this point, but they need to plan just in case.
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