Some students should repeat grade

Re: Should some students repeat this school year? Ontario doesn’t give families a choice, May 19.

School policy-makers don’t care about acquired knowledge; it’s a question of pushing bodies through the system to meet quotas and expediency, regardless of whether the child has learned his or her curriculum. If the student doesn’t know their stuff, our school system passes them and sends them on to the next grade regardless. This produces knowledge gaps that children find difficult to overcome.

I have personal experience with this. My experience is with absenteeism. The average absence per year for a student in Canada is three days. Psychologists say missing 10 days a year is catastrophic to the child’s school year and self image; yet my young relative — a normal, inquisitive, healthy child in

Grade 6, and through no fault of his own — has missed 30 or more days year after year for the past five years. He is confused, doesn’t know his stuff, yet gets passed to the next grade year after year. Imagine his difficulty when entering high school.

We hired a tutor for him and she has found it necessary to go back to Grade 3 in the curriculum in an effort to teach him what he does not know.

His experience is indicative of an elementary school system that is inflexible and broken. If we really care about our children, we will forget about expediency and cost and have the children who have missed so much time because of COVID-19 repeat the school year; indeed it is a great opportunity to review all the previous grades and ensure our children really do know the curriculum and truly are ready for the next grade.

I cannot bring myself to think about age-related grade placement; it is too preposterous to contemplate.

Ron Johnson, Maxville