Back-to-school can be a gamble for parents
Parents everywhere are agonizing over sending their children back to school in the middle of a pandemic, but none more so than Sarah Fountain. The mother of two is fighting Stage 4 cancer and the stakes couldn’t be higher as she prepares to send her daughter to kindergarten.
For Fountain, the fear of children contracting the disease in school and bringing it home is not a fanciful one. “My situation is probably a little bit darker than most,” Fountain says. “And it was a very difficult decision to try and figure out what to do. We looked at all options to save us from the risk of public school.”
Fountain, a lawyer, was diagnosed shortly after the birth of her son last year, and went on disability leave this February. Then, COVID-19 struck, plunging the family into “another layer of stress” on top of what was already a pretty tough situation. As the country shut down and people hunkered in their homes in fear of the novel coronavirus, Fountain had the added pressure of dealing with cancer. She also had a toddler and four-year-old to raise.
You don’t stop being a mother because you are ill, and every day was a challenge. She has a supportive husband, a college teacher who works from home, but even then, taking care of two young kids while battling cancer took its toll. “I was physically and mentally drained trying to keep up,” she says.
As the school reopening drew ever closer, she and her husband had a tough decision to make: Send their daughter to school or keep her at home.
The family was counting on reduced classes to help them navigate reopening more safely,
If I am deciding between my health and my kid’s, my kid’s health is ... more important.
but the government’s decision to maintain normal class sizes complicated their decision-making. Keeping the child at home would limit contact with the outside world, but they worried what a prolonged absence from school might do to her mental well-being.
At the same time, they fretted over their daughter coming into contact with a large number of people in school, unsure of what she might bring home to a vulnerable mother.
“I felt like the choice was between her health and mine,” Fountain says. “If I am deciding between my health and my kid’s, my kid’s health is clearly more important. But if she becomes unwell and brings the virus home and infects me, then she may be without a mom.”
In the end, the family decided it was best for their daughter to be in school, despite the risks. “She’s the kind of child whose development and well-being depends on being in that environment. We want her to socialize again, practising all the behaviours of independence necessary for growth that she wasn’t getting at home,” Fountain says. “We are anxious … but as long as community spread is low, we’ll keep her in school.”
Many other parents would be taking calculated gambles of their own when they see their children off to school — or not.
Two weeks ago, Milena Gonzalez and her husband were set on sending their son to kindergarten because mixing with other children would be good for his development. But they’ve now opted for three days of daycare. “It came down to class sizes. There would be 25 kids in the class and that’s just too big,” says Gonzalez, a federal public servant. “In daycare, there would be 15. The risk seems a lot less.”
For her part, Brooke Banks, whose husband is a teacher in one of the city’s largest schools, worries about what he might bring home. What’s more, their two children will also be attending kindergarten in the same school, and the family has to contend with all the associated risks of being in large classes. They opted for in-person schooling because with Banks working from home, online learning for two children would just be too much to handle.
Like many parents, Fountain is facing school reopening with some trepidation. There’s no knowing what might happen. All she can do is hope for the best.