The president of the Yukon Association of Educational Professionals says his members are angry and frustrated over the current COVID-19 rules regime mandated by the Yukon government.

Ted Hupé told the Star Wednesday teachers are particularly upset by what they see as double-standards between the community rules and the rules for schools.

He said the schools in the territory individually and collectively represent some of the biggest congregate settings in the territory, yet there are fewer protections in place for staff and students than afforded the public.

“COVID doesn’t stop at the door,” Hupé said. “We’re at the mercy of fate. It seems as if we are at a lower level of importance to the government.”

Even with rules in places for students to be masked all day, among other measures, Hupé said his members are concerned it’s a bit of a free-for-all in between classes when students can mingle in the halls.

He also noted his members are expressing concerns that students are expected to eat lunch in the same classrooms they are taught in the rest of the day.

While they are eating, they aren’t masked, he pointed out, negating the measures taking the rest of the time.

“As kids, they are also all over each other during lunch,” he said. “It’s not eliminating the risk.”

That’s a lower threshold than is expected of the general public, Hupé said.

Compounding that is the new reality that parents don’t have to report any positive COVID-19 tests to the school.

Teachers and staff know that means there are an unknown number of infections every person at school is being exposed to.

“We know there are students who have COVID, or family members, but we’re not hearing about it,” Hupé said.

That’s a bit unnerving for teachers and staff, he added.

“Schools are petri dishes at the best of times,” he said. “COVID-19 makes it worse. We have no idea of how many cases of COVID we are facing everyday.

As it stands, the government isn’t budging much on the idea of closing schools and moving to remote learning.

Hupé said they are highly-resistant to the idea of making it easier, since they are entrenched in the position that schools are safe zones.

The only way a school will make that pivot, he said, is if enough staff aren’t present on a given day to safely operate.

Hupe added the government hasn’t provided clear benchmarks for doing that. Instead, it’s at the call of every individual principal.

The process, he said, is as follows. If a principal decides there are too few staff present at the beginning of the day to function properly, those numbers are compiled and sent to Department of Education officials to review.

If department officials agree, the decision can be made to close the school and switch to remote learning.

“It’s very subjective.”

Hupé said that despite his suggestions, the department isn’t willing to give the principals the power to make the switch themselves.

The process, he added, isn’t as simple as it seems, and is somewhat discriminatory by position.

“Basically, some people are more important than others under this system,” Hupé said.

He made the following comparison. If five educational assistants at a given school were not working on a given day, services would suffer, but their absences could possibly be covered.

If five home-room teachers called in sick, though, that’s a much bigger headache for a principal to manage, Hupe said.

“Who is absent is more important than the actual numbers,” he said.

He said some schools have already approached that threshold of being able to operate safely this month, but none have slipped over that precipice yet.

During Thursday morning’s COVID-19 briefing, the Star asked Dr. Catherine Elliott, the acting chief medical officer of health, how education professionals are supposed to prepare for work without knowing how many cases of COVID-19 they could face on a given day.

“We cannot get the risk down to zero,” Elliott said. “We know children need in-person learning. There’s potential in many, many settings, including schools.”

She then spoke for a couple of minutes on how parents can evaluate the risks of sending their children to school, and again stressed the importance of handwashing and vaccines.

She did not circle back with any advice for teachers and other educational staff with anxities about their workplace environments.