Kids need to go back to school, but we need more input
Stephen Lecce froze, stayed stuck and eventually vanished. Ontario’s minister of education was speaking on Facebook via Zoom and then he wasn’t, though YouTube still worked. Consider it a tribute to the glitches of e-learning, if nothing else.
Look, we’re going to need to get kids back into schools. Maybe not every child, but most of them.
Parents juggling work and homework during the pandemic have been fried. Children have been affected, especially only children, younger children, children with special needs. There are so many complex long-tail consequences to this pandemic: medical, economic, psychological, educational. Schools might be both terribly complex, and the easiest one to fix.
“I strongly believe children need to return to school in September, not as a mandated thing, but by September it will be six months since the shutdown,” says Dr. Nisha Thampi, a pediatric infectious disease consultant and assistant professor at the University of Ottawa.
“And we’ve seen an astronomical increase in our health consults. We’re seeing children who didn’t have previously identified developmental needs now manifesting those; and medically complex children, who have historically been marginalized, need” more than ever.
On Wednesday, Sick Kids released its recommendations for children returning to school in September; by Thursday it had attracted criticism, suggestion, derision and some praise.
“This is entirely pediatricians writing about a school decision, and what the document screams out is there’s no expertise in this document related to the health of people who aren’t children,” says Dr. David Fisman, epidemiologist at the University of Toronto. “There’s this fetishization of creating a sense of normality for children … which is completely mismatched to this moment.”
“It’s a start,” said Dr. Thampi. “And a very helpful start.”
“It’s a skeletal examination of it. And not terribly well thought out,” says Dr. Abdu Sharkawy, an infectious disease specialist and ICU doctor at Toronto Western Hospital. “Erring too much on the side of freedom and complacency is dangerous, knowing that the influenza season is predictable, and it’s going to happen, and we know the risk that poses.
“I think people are going to be willing to accept some amount of inconvenience if it means other people won’t be at risk.”
At its heart, this is about balancing risk. Children suffer the disease at a much lower level; research indicates that below the age of nine or 10 they are less likely to contract it, though Fisman has data showing that children under 10 had the highest test positivity rate in Ontario over the last month.
And there are still grey areas as to how much children transmit the disease; that is the key. Israel had school outbreaks; Finland and Norway and many other countries didn’t. In Canada, British Columbia didn’t see any outbreaks from returning to school, but only 35 per cent of children between kindergarten to Grade 5 returned, and only 16 per cent from Grade 6 to Grade 12. Quebec opened schools with strict restrictions, and didn’t see a surge.
It’s the most important thing. Because if almost all kids can contract COVID-19 with little chance of serious illness or passing it to adults, school can become a pillar of relative normalcy, can’t it? Maybe they could even play together, the way kids are supposed to.
Dr. Michael Silverman is the chair of infectious diseases at Western’s Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, and is a co-author of an as-yet unpublished paper arguing for children to return to school as quickly as possible. He believes the data shows kids don’t transmit the disease enough to outweigh everything else.
“We haven’t had a single child die in Canada. So it’s not the risk to the children, it’s the risk to other people,” says Dr. Silverman. “And there’s no evidence the kids are a risk to other people. I think schools should be open in the summer because everyone thinks there will be a second wave (in the fall), and it’ll be like Beijing, where they’re closing the schools now. This is the one window to get them some education where we think it will be quiet for a while.
“All the data is that preschool and early childhood education, the first three grades, JK and SK, has major impacts on how likely they are to eventually get a job, how much money they’re going to earn, are they going to get depressed, are they going to get high blood pressure and diabetes? All these things are impacted by access to this.
“If you hurt someone’s business, you can bail them out. If you hurt someone’s cognitive development, the government can’t fix it.” But Sam Hammond, the president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, says summer school hasn’t come up as far as he knows.
“Based on where we are now, and what’s being recommended in terms of personal protective equipment, we have expectations that that would be in place, even if it’s on a voluntary basis,” says Hammond. “I actually think that’s the smart way to go, to leave the reopening until September, until the fall.”
So that’s one piece. Children being taught not to fear other children might be another. Maybe teachers with underlying conditions do e-learning with the kids whose parents keep them home. Maybe kids only go a few days a week, so they can socially distance inside. This government has not been kind to education: It rewound to a retrograde sex-ed curriculum, before relenting, and pushed the teachers into strikes that were only solved under the pressure of the pandemic.
It has been laudably cautious on schools, but that was the easy part. The real lesson of the Sick Kids report is we need pediatricians, but also infectious disease specialists, teachers, educators and more. Special needs children need more funding, and help. Teachers need more support. Even if you start by being more cautious than Sick Kids allows, you can loosen that as time goes on. It takes a village, right? The province needs to listen to more than one hospital.
“This is a must-do, can’t-fail,” says Dr. Thampi. “Children haven’t been driving this pandemic, and they shouldn’t be bearing its consequences.”
Our children need help, and parents need help, and e-learning is a joke. Time for the province to do this right.
If most kids can contract COVID-19 with little chance of serious illness, school can become a pillar of relative normalcy, can’t it?