WATCH: Why local school employees will not face vaccine mandate after all

Those teachers, staff and trustees at Central Okanagan Public Schools who have not been vaccinated are off the hook, for now at least.

The board has voted unanimously to pause the implementation of its COVID-19 vaccine mandate and testing program.

As it stood, all employees who did not disclose their vaccine status by this Friday would have had to agree to regular testing or, if not, take a leave of absence without pay.

But SD23 chair Moyra Baxter said she called an emergency meeting of the board Tuesday ahead of the spring break, because of changes coming next month regarding provincial rules.

Masks will not be mandated for K -12 education after the school holidays and the vaccine passport will be dropped April 8.

“From the start [of the pandemic] we have followed the orders of the provincial health officer,” Baxter told Kelowna10, noting it made sense to keep following them now that things are changing.

She said they decided to pause the mandate calling on staff to disclose their vaccination status because the public will, "no longer be asked for that when they go into other venues.”

The decision to pause the mandates follows an often-bitter debate among staff and parents that started in January. Baxter acknowledged sections of the community would continue to be split on the issue.

“We had some families, a minority, who refused to have their children wear masks; [and] we had the vast majority of parents who believed we were doing the right thing in complying with the health orders,” Baxter explained.

She said about 91 per cent of all employees have so far been vaccinated.

Asked if the school board would face the same friction should new COVID variants of concern show up in the fall, Baxter said the existing agreement was set to expire on June 30 anyway and they’d have to discussed things again at that time.

“If we get into the fall and there are new things happening then we’d have to talk about a new agreement and how that was going to work,” she said, also noting if things changed for the worse before June 30 there would have to be further discussions.

At the end of January, the SD 23 board voted to approve the vaccine mandate during an online meeting that attracted nearly 1,000 viewers.

Latest COVID numbers

B.C. is reporting 235 new cases of COVID-19 as of Wednesday, the vast majority of which are in the Interior. There were 329 individuals hospitalized across the province with COVID-19 and 51 in intensive care. There were eight new deaths.

In the Interior there were 182 new cases, 66 hospitalizations and 9 in intensive care. There were no new deaths.