Classroom conundrum: thousands of students are missing
Sudden drop in enrolment creates ‘logistical nightmare,’ financial pressure for boards
When the thought of sending her kids back to brick-and-mortar school in the middle of a pandemic made her nervous, Karin Rotem started to look around for alternatives.
She wasn’t hot on forcing her kids to wear masks to school. Or have their hands doused often in sanitizer. Virtual learning had appeal, but she felt her kids might be depressed staring at a screen all day. So when the stars miraculously aligned on Aug. 28, she leapt at the chance to bubble up her kids with another like-minded family and split the cost of a teacher.
“We really stressed about this and lost sleep over it,” she said. “We did this for our sanity and our kids’ safety.” She’s not the only one. Rotem’s son, 6, and two daughters, 8 and 11, are three of at least 10,000 students, and likely many more, who this year have exited the public education system en masse, leaving school boards across the province scrambling to figure out where they’ve gone — and how to deal with it.
Amid the chaos of this unprecedented year, education has been hit hard — from COVID-19 outbreaks and tech shortages to staffing issues and problems keeping class sizes to a safe level. The overwhelming number of noshow students presents one more challenge in a year that’s already had far more than its share.
“This has never happened, where you have had this many kids not show up,” Toronto District School Board chair Alexander Brown told the Star. “It is a logistical nightmare. And no one knows how to navigate it.”
The TDSB has reported it is down roughly 5,500 students — more than double the number of no-shows in a typical year, when around one per cent of the board’s roughly 240,000 students don’t turn up in class, according to a spokesperson. Toronto’s Catholic board told the Star its enrolment is also down this year by between 2,000 and 2,500 students. And the Peel District School Board is missing roughly 2,800 students who were expected in class. All of these kids were either registered and did not show up for school, or were projected to attend, but didn’t.
But the full scope of this great departure from mainstream school is not yet known. That’s because the Ministry of Education has given Ontario’s school boards more time to sort through their enrolment woes.
Under normal circumstances, school boards are expected to report enrolment numbers to the province by about mid-October. This year, they’ve been given until Dec. 15 to submit revised numbers.
While it’s imperative to find these kids, educators say, to make sure they are getting some form of education, there could also be financial implications to this year’s provincial public school departure. If boards can’t account for these students, it could affect education budgets going forward. Fewer kids in the system this year may mean less funding next year, or whenever there’s a vaccine for the virus and boards anticipate these students will return.
In the TDSB alone, these noshow students could mean a budget shortfall of $41.2 million, said spokesperson Ryan Bird. In an email to the Star, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Education said the ministry is aware of the enrolment decline and other financial pressures as a result of the pandemic. “The ministry will continue to monitor and consider a variety of options on how to support school boards during the 2020-21 school year.”
For now, school staff are calling and emailing parents to try to locate these kids.
Cathy Abraham, president of the Ontario School Board Association, reiterated that the main purpose of doing so is to confirm that they are receiving an education in some way — and if not, help them get it. But, she said, part of the difficulty in finding them is that some parents didn’t let school boards know their alternative academic plans. Likely, she said, because they didn’t know they had to.
While there is an expectation for parents to let authorities know they are either pulling their kids from public school or not planning to register them at all, there is no law in Ontario that mandates parents must register their children in either the public or private education systems. Rather, there is a policy on home-schooling. Policy/ Program Memorandum 131 on the Ministry of Education’s website suggests parents “should notify the school board of their intent in writing.”
This year, roughly 1,377 students in the TDSB did just that. In a typical year, a TDSB spokesperson said, the board has about 1,160 home-schoolers, so it is counting these 217 new home-schooling students as part of its no-shows — but, ones that are accounted for.
Karin Rotem’s kids are three of these 217 students whose parents let the board know their academic plans for the year. It didn’t occur to Rotem not to let the board know, but said it took quite a bit of searching online to figure out who to tell — and what to tell them. “It was definitely a process,” she said. But, worth it.
Each morning, she drops her kids off at a one-room schoolhouse, of sorts, in Thornhill for a full day of lessons, adapted from the public school curriculum, for the kids who are in three different grades. It’s a bit of drive, but her kids are happy, she says, and she doesn’t have to worry about the virus — or that her kids are getting a good education.
Rotem lost sleep this summer over worries about the safety of her kids in an in-person school environment because of all the unknowns swirling around COVID. Her daughter has had several bouts of pneumonia and once ended up in hospital with meningitis. The other family is similarly worried about the virus. And the teacher, who is on leave from her job at a private school, didn’t feel comfortable working around so many kids.
Rotem said she worried about transmitting any kind of health threat to her elderly father.
In terms of schooling, Rotem is thrilled that her kids are getting individual instruction and a lot of one-on-one time. The two families have split the cost of the teacher, something Rotem acknowledges is not inexpensive.
While it was a hard decision to make to pull her kids from mainstream school, Rotem feels lucky her family found a situation that works, saying “it’s really something positive now.”
Carlo Ricci, an education professor at Nipissing University in North Bay, said the pandemic has likely turned many parents on to teaching their kids at home. Ricci is an expert in alternative schooling, as well as a volunteer with the Ontario Federation of Teaching Parents (OFTP), a non-profit that provides information to parents interested in transitioning to teaching their kids at home.
While he said it is impossible to tell how many of the no-show students might also have chosen home-schooling, he wouldn’t be surprised if that is the case. Membership in the OFTP is up since the pandemic hit, he said, and parents across Ontario have been reaching out in droves.
Maybe, Ricci said, parents who’ve been thinking of switching to home-schooling have finally seized the opportunity, now that they’re at home and it finally makes sense. Perhaps they’re frustrated by distance learning, or think they can do a better job than the public schools.
Some parents, he said, might even be seeing positive changes in their children’s mental health as a result of staying home and want to make it a more permanent arrangement. “Some people might be witnessing their children healing from the bullying and testing and anxiety,” he said. “They might be thinking, ‘Wait a minute, my child is more relaxed and calm and happier.’ They might be thinking that now they’ll go a different path.”
Rachel Danzinger, founder of Learning PODS Canada and the first, she believes, to bring the concept to the country, said it is important for parents to have choice this year, no matter what pedagogical route they decide to take for their kids.
Learning pods are another way of describing any number of alternative educational arrangements, which could include home-schooling, or bubbling up with other families in order to give virtual learners registered in the public school system an opportunity to socialize safely. Or even pooling resources with other families to hire a teacher of their own.
“There are no rules” to creating a pod, Danzinger said. That is a large part of why it is hard to know exactly how many of the no-show students are part of one.
However, she said, the Learning PODS Canada Facebook group has “tens of thousands” of members, including roughly 5,000 families and teachers across Canada who have filled out the site’s survey. Intended to help parents match with likeminded parents and teachers in order to form a pod, it asks about everything from level of “COVID sensitivity, how important it is for them to steer clear of the virus, to what learning modality their kids prefer.
Another reason it may be difficult to estimate how many parents have chosen a pod is because they are purposely keeping a low-profile. This summer, pods became a target of ire as debate raged over whether they foster inequality, serving only to widen the gap between families who can afford to pay for their children’s education and those who cannot.
Danziger has been frustrated by the negativity toward pods because, she said, the concept is really only about “empowering parents to have educational choice at a time when it’s a necessity. How fair is it for a kid with an IEP (independent education plan) or who has asthma to be trying to have a normal education right now? How fair is it for a teacher to have to do double duty as a janitor? Is that equality?”
One mother, a trained teacher who decided to open her own pod in a yoga studio this year, refused to give her name to the Star for fear of becoming a target of online attacks — and of being fined by the province. After taking the year off to teach her own kids at home, she decided to turn it into a business, offering her services to two additional children.
Each day, she leads her own children through classes and helps the other two kids, who are both registered as virtual learners in the TDSB. The arrangement is a boon, she says, because all the kids can learn together in a safe, social environment. And, she can keep herself afloat financially.
But she has to lie low because she has five school-aged kids in her pod, which could be viewed as an offence under the Education Act. According to the act, pods with five or more students must register as private schools and pay a non-refundable $300 fee, among other requirements.
“It’s risky,” she said. “Pods are controversial.”