Toronto Catholic District School Board trustees have voted not to allow polling stations to be set up inside schools later this month amid concerns about the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The trustees voted 6-5 in favour of the resolution during a special meeting held Tuesday night.

The resolution acknowledges that TCDSB schools are typically used as polling stations but it says that allowing “unidentified people into our indoor school facilities would carry more risk” this year given the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I worry that having thousands of people coming in and out of the building, some vaccinated and some not, can we clean the space in time? Do we have kids coming through some of those same areas (the next day). I worry about that,” TCDSB Chair Joseph Martino told CTV News Toronto on Wednesday morning. “My biggest thing is to make sure that students are safe and staff are safe and I do not think that would be possible with what we were going to do.”

Martino said that he wouldn’t necessarily have objected to using some larger secondary schools as polling stations but he noted that many of the 94 TCDSB buildings slated to be used by Elections Canada on Sept. 20 were smaller elementary school with less space for voters.

He said that Elections Canada has already been notified of the decision, which will hopefuly give them sufficient time to find alternate locations.

“We didn’t have graduations (last year) because we didn’t want a lot of people in the buildings. We did a lot of things over the last 18 months where it is very tough to make those kinds of decisions but we make them,” he said.