Want to fix student absence rates?
Reduce illness in schools
If you think that children are missing more school due to illness than they did before the pandemic began, you’re not imagining things.
If you suspect constant illness is affecting their education, you’re not wrong.
Documents obtained from Nova Scotia Public Health by Protect our Province Nova Scotia reveal just how high absence rates were from October 2022 to March 2023.
A school absence report is sent from a school to Public Health every day a principal recognizes that the percentage of total students absent most likely due to illness is 10 per cent or higher. During this period, more than 1,200 school absence reports, submitted by 111 schools located in Nova Scotia Health’s Central Zone, detail disrupted learning and massive challenges to teaching conditions only rivalled by the remote learning months in 2020.
By the end of October 2022, reporting schools were experiencing, on average, a 17 per cent absence rate. By November 2022, reporting schools were experiencing an average of 20 per cent, with some individual schools reporting absences in the ranges of 30 and 40 per cent.
“Last two weeks our absences were much higher due to illness,” wrote one reporting elementary school at the beginning of December. “We were reporting 50-60 absent.” That’s about 35 per cent of that school’s population.
Reporting consistency is not as reliable as it should be due to flaws in the reporting system. Many of the school administrators themselves point out the new Safe Arrive reporting system introduced under the Houston government in spring 2022 doesn’t allow parents and guardians to indicate a reason for a student’s absence. This makes it very difficult for schools to accurately report when they experience greater than 10 per cent absences due to illness.
However, some parents notify the schools directly by phone or email and give a reason. In addition, many students exhibiting a variety of symptoms at school were sent home before 10 a.m., most often due to extreme discomfort in their stomachs and heads, as well as vomiting or diarrhea.
SYMPTOMS OF LONG COVID
One elementary school added extreme fatigue as a prevalent symptom and reported it throughout November and December. Another included lethargy as a reason for school absence.
Children are susceptible to the effects of long COVID, and it seems likely that some students were exhibiting these symptoms.
The illnesses disclosed by parents to schools included RSV, strep, influenza, scarlet fever, chicken pox, rubella, Fifths disease, Kawasaki Disease, earaches and lots of COVID. The exact numbers of these cases on any given day are impossible to determine because almost all of the specific counts were redacted in the documents obtained through the freedom of information request. But of those not redacted, sometimes there were five students, other times 15, 16 or 30 who were sent home specifically with COVID symptoms.
In one school, over a period of three days, they were missing six, then eight and finally 10 teachers due to confirmed cases of COVID. In the early days of the pandemic, three cases was considered an outbreak. Losing 10 staff members should’ve been cause for alarm.
Often, the number of missing staff was redacted, but on average it seems reporting schools experienced between 10 and 14 per cent staff absence rates during this period.
“We have had an average of 12-18 per cent absenteeism in our school over the past couple of weeks and increasing every day,” stated a school report.
“We have had no less than 10 employees out per day over the past two weeks . . . . I believe our students who are out due to illness is much higher than reported.”
At the end of November 2022, Elwin Leroux, the deputy minis- ter of the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, dismissed the Nova Scotia Teachers Union’s staffing concerns, explain- ing that principals work with existing staff to determine whether they need a substitute and sometimes student absences are so high the school doesn’t require additional teachers. The absence reports seem to indicate that often the principals and their team needed more staff.
According to the Occupational Health and Safety Act, each school and Centre for Education (as employers) has a legislated duty to “take every precaution that is reasonable in the circumstances to ensure the health and safety of persons at or near the workplace.”
INSPECTIONS OF SCHOOLS WARRANTED
The absence reports confirm anecdotal evidence and justify a workplace inspection at several provincial schools. However, the safety branch of the Labour, Skills and Immigration Department has remained silent on this issue.
Teachers and staff never should be expected to work in these conditions. They’re not health-care workers and schools aren’t clinics. It’s shocking to read through days of reports dutifully submitted by schools.
Sometimes school administration noted that a few families were keeping students home because of the amount of illness in the school. And who could blame them? Especially if they happened to be families with vulnerable loved ones, or if their student was more susceptible to negative effects of infection.
We don’t need to keep living like this every school year. The education system isn’t designed to accommodate waves of student and teacher absences.
The loud voices who blame “learning loss” on the few months of remote learning in 2020 are either disingenuous or incredibly uninformed. In a cohort-based education model, students are expected to advance together throughout the duration of a grade or course. When the student group is broken — due to illness, for example — it’s very difficult to continue building on prior learning. Often it means teachers have to revise their plans and reteach concepts multiple times, breaking the expected curriculum pacing.
Some would have you believe that parents and guardians are to blame, claiming that it’s OK to send children to school even when they’re unwell. No one can learn when they’re sick, and rest is important for recovering as quickly and fully as possible. High numbers of school absences are an administrative and public health problem, not a failure on the part of parents and students.
The issue isn’t that students and teachers are absent; the problem is they’re getting sick in the first place. COVID has changed things. It’s well documented that the SARS-COV-2 virus is airborne, is easily transmitted and has a lasting negative effect on our immune system. More effort is needed to prevent the transmission of illness in schools.
AVOIDING AIRBORNE ILLNESSES
We can break the transmission of these illnesses with practical interventions.
To avoid high transmission rates of airborne illnesses, classrooms should be outfitted with effective air filters and teachers encouraged to keep the windows open an inch, to improve air quality in the short term, while ventilation is upgraded in the long term.
Long before COVID arrived, clean indoor air was proven to improve academic outcomes. It’s more important than ever.
When chief medical officer of health Dr. Robert Strang mentioned the use of masks in crowded indoor spaces during a November 2022 news briefing, the government should have gone farther and instituted a policy that reintroduced good-quality masks in classes when the absence rate was more than 10 per cent and high rates of infection put students and teachers at greater risk.
Hiring more teachers and creating smaller classes benefit student and teacher health while promoting a better environment for learning. Students can receive more individual attention in a smaller class. This also means recognizing that schools required to accept students beyond the intended capacity for the building will require improved infrastructure.
And parents need paid family sick days so they can stay home with their young children.
This isn’t old news. The 2023-24 academic year has seen similarly high rates of illness and absences, including alarmingly high rates of strep resulting in tragic and unnecessary fatalities.
School years like 2022-23 and 2023-24 can’t continue if we’re serious about providing students with a meaningful and effective education. It’s time the government took responsibility for ensuring safe working and learning conditions in Nova Scotia schools.