Students model citizens during COVID crisis
Campus cases have been in the single digits
This past year, Nova Scotia’s post-secondary students did not get what they bargained for.
During the 2020-21 academic year, students paid three per cent higher tuition for online learning, and fees are expected to rise, whether classes return or not. Students were unable to participate in campus activities, clubs, and societies, a core component of a well-rounded education.
Many were unable to work due to the unpredictable economic landscape and resulting hiring freezes — and working through school has become an essential prerequisite if you’re to find a job upon graduation. In fact, students faced the highest youth unemployment rate recorded by Statistics Canada in May 2020, at 29.4 per cent.
Students, like many others, were hit hard this year. Lack of quality classroom time, isolation, and unemployment — while taking on tens of thousands in debt — is a far cry from the typical campus experience.
International students were stranded with no financial support, ineligible for any funding from the government. Campus counselling centres fielded an influx of mental health concerns while delivering virtual care.
Move-in days and graduations were cancelled across the province, entrenching a sense of this “new normal” that we all feel.
Despite these challenges, students and youth kept our collective goal in sight and rose to the bigger and more important challenge facing Nova Scotia: keeping our communities safe.
In August 2020, chief medical officer Dr. Robert Strang and former premier Stephen Mcneil announced that all post-secondary students returning from outside of the Atlantic bubble were to receive three COVID-19 tests during their quarantine. Not only were students tested, but many chose to volunteer at pop-up clinics in communities and on campuses. This effort saw 3,500 students receive about 9,000 COVID-19 tests — the largest demographic to be tested in our province.
When Nova Scotia faced a spike in cases in November, students and youth were encouraged to get tested once again. In the first days of pop-up testing at Dalhousie, Dr. Lisa Barrett and her team administered nearly 5,000 tests — the majority to people between the ages of 18 and 35. Over several weeks, young people flooded pop-up sites all over our province, not only volunteering to get tested, but also to be the people making the testing sites work. We did, and continue to do, our part to keep vulnerable Nova Scotians protected.
To date, campus cases have been in the single digits, including at those institutions with in-person classes. This is largely attributable to the countless young people who have made responsible decisions throughout this pandemic — young Nova Scotians who choose to get tested before grabbing a beer with their friends; young Nova Scotians who continue to make up the vast majority of individuals receiving a test at pop-up rapid COVID testing sites in downtown Halifax.
It is not an accident that Nova Scotia is one of the safest jurisdictions in the world; it has come with sacrifice, for all of us, and students and youth have been no different. Through regular use of COVID protection tools such as testing, students are active contributors to, and protectors of, community safety.
There is an all-too-common trope that depicts young people as apathetic. We hear stories of rule-breakers and troublemakers, or millennials with their avocado toast and selfies. These stereotypes paint youth and students — a sizable population in a province with 10 universities and 15 college campuses — as selfish. In Nova Scotia, we have witnessed the opposite.
It has been a trying year for all of us, and with vaccines yet to fully roll out, we are not out of the woods. Looking for model behaviour in how to get us safely to fall? I suggest you look to and follow the example set by students and youth provincewide.