School District 43 trustees want the province to make vaccinations mandatory for children attending B.C. public schools.
Board chair Judy Shirra said the reemergence of preventable diseases such as measles and whooping cough has made the issue urgent and she hopes the BC School Trustees Association will pass SD43's resolution calling for mandatory vaccinations at its annual general meeting in April.
"For me, it was long overdue," said Shirra, a Port Coquitlam trustee. "It's very rarely a chair makes a motion. I thought, If I can get this on its way, it would be nice to have it ready before next year."
The resolution, passed unanimously by trustees at the Dec. 8 board of education meeting, comes eight months after a measles scare at PoCo's Terry Fox secondary, when a student came down with the disease after taking a flight from China. Public health nurses scoured immunization records for 1,500 students and held vaccination clinics, and in the end, a handful of students whose vaccinations couldn't be proved were asked to stay home.
Shirra said she was alarmed by the resurgence of measles and said the concern was brought close to home when a teacher she knew in the Fraser Valley contracted the disease, passed it on to his wife and she lost her baby.
"We're putting our head in the sand if we are not addressing this," she said. "It's really important."
While the SD43 resolution calls for vaccinations to be mandatory in all schools to ensure staff and student safety, Shirra said exemptions could be made for religious reasons, with parents showing proof of vaccination when they register their children, and the information kept in the province's MyEd BC data system.
In the event of an outbreak, unvaccinated students could be asked to stay home from school. "I want a line item that says 'yes' they've been inoculated or 'no' they haven't — a simple data collection at the end of the day," Shirra said.
The resolution has already been brought to the BCSTA provincial council meeting in October but was turned down, Shirra said, because of the wording.
It has since been updated with additional information, and the revamped resolution was passed by trustees last week. But Shirra said she expects more debate when the motion is introduced at the BCSTA AGM and the wording possibly changed. Still, she hopes it will pass in time for the provincial government to consider the idea and get it in place before the next school year.
The resolution notes that in Australia, government benefits are withheld from families that fail to immunize their children.
In August, the Canadian Medical Association passed a motion recommending proof of vaccination records for children attending public schools but stopped short of mandatory vaccinations. Instead, the CMA recommends that records be kept and public health officers have conversations with parents of children shown to be inadequately immunized.
In the Tri-Cities, immunization rates are among the highest in the region — 72% in Coquitlam and 71% in Port Moody and Port Coquitlam — but the numbers indicate that as many as 30% of babies aren't being brought in for their measles shot at 12 months and, therefore, are not immunized against the disease as well as others such as meningitis and chickenpox. However, Fraser Health has said there may be gaps in reporting when babies are immunized at doctor's offices and rates of immunization could be higher.
Fraser Health and the Ministry of Health were contacted about the SD43 resolution but did not have a response to the trustees' resolution.
But Minister of Health Terry Lake has been reported as saying various provincial ministries are looking into ways to track vaccination information for public schools.
