It’s OK to choose the slippery slope and err on the side of joy
It should have been a snow day. The blizzard closed two Toronto highways and the city cancelled vaccine clinics in a pandemic. Buses were stranded, streetcars stopped, the premier pretended to work as a tow-truck driver. It was a real storm.
In normal times, schools would have closed too. A snow day is one of the joys of childhood that burns into your memory, starting with that jolt you get when mom breaks the news. You remember it, right? Pulling on your snow pants, falling into the snow; the sense of freedom, of release, of a world turned into a playground. Of a change.
But across Ontario school boards had to make a difficult decision, and in many places the snow day was cancelled. The Toronto District School Board, for example, sent an email at 6:47 p.m. on Sunday explaining it would be another day of remote learning because of the logistical chaos Omicron will likely bring. And they’re probably not wrong about that.
And it still felt like the wrong decision. The pandemic takes a lot, but one of the things it steals is time. You never really get it back.
“While we had shared last month that if buses were cancelled, it would be a typical ‘snow day’ (no live learning), as the entire system has already been learning remotely for almost two weeks and given the disruptions to students’ learning, we feel it would be best to extend remote learning for one additional day in Kindergarten to Grade 12,” wrote the TDSB Sunday evening. “This is especially important as we anticipate an increased number of students and staff absences as a result of COVID-19 and related isolations over the upcoming weeks.”
In a nod to civility, the board declined to spell out the word Bleepshow. My 12-year-old twins are in middle school and there are already staff absences despite nobody having set foot in a classroom since Dec. 17. Omicron cases have likely peaked in Ontario — Toronto Medical Officer of Health Dr. Eileen de Villa noted preliminary wastewater data is showing it could be the case, and wastewater data from several other cities are showing the same. But the ride down still means an immense number of cases until you hit bottom again, and that means schools will be a white-knuckle ride for all involved, in a province whose brilliant plan was neither to test widely nor alert parents until 30 per cent of the school wasn’t in the building.
So some chaos is probably coming. Teachers will vanish at the last minute; students will come and go. In New York, where HEPA filters and masking are part of the program, the stories were dystopian and it took 10 days for New York City to start considering a move back to virtual. There has already been plenty of damage done to education in Ontario.
So it’s easy to argue educators should absolutely take every chance to educate kids. Ontario was often unwilling to implement other restrictions in industry in order to prioritize schools, and is said to have had more total pandemic school closures than any jurisdiction. So Monday there were more virtual classes, whether synchronous or asynchronous, to make up for learning already lost, and learning that might be.
There are no perfect options at the moment. There just aren’t. Transmission will happen in schools because it did before Omicron, if at a slow-burning rate. Ontario’s pediatric hospitalization rates are currently in the same neighbourhood as hospitalization rates for 30-49year-olds, likely on sheer volume of cases, and a lack of pediatric hospitalization capacity may soon become an issue.
But there are signs of genuine harms to children without school, too — the province’s independent volunteer science table compiled a report last week, though some doctors took issue with the data involved.
A lot of it comes down to your situation, and your children. Some people can’t work easily from home, and that includes healthcare workers; the more Omicron circulates, the more health-care workers won’t be able to get to what is already a short-staffed workplace. Some kids need in-person school. Ontario’s controls on transmission don’t seem to count much on controlling transmission. It’s a wicked problem. And the decision Monday was, no snow day.
Plenty of parents didn’t listen. They got their kids to the local toboggan hill (for the record, the orange torpedo sled for $23 at Canadian Tire is just a superior sledding product), or just sent their kids outside. Ontario closed playgrounds, once.
In my house, we decided to make it a snow day. Our four kids have handled virtual school about as well as we could ask, despite one teacher who more or less abdicated this year, but they’ve lost a lot of things they loved, too. So we decided to err on the side of joy. My kids yelled “THE SNOWPLOW’S HERE” when it rumbled down the street because it builds a mountain on our lawn, and this year the mountain was taller than our minivan, and my children clomped through the snow, fell down backwards and forwards, dug arm-sized tunnels, hid in hand-dug trenches, and surfed the little hill on our lawn with other (masked) kids on the street, flattening one side and sledding down face-first before they had to rejig the path away from a tree.
Joy. We’ve decided to live cautiously in this pandemic for a lot of reasons, and we weren’t taking this away. Monday night we had to backtrack on the drive to the toboggan hill this time because the big plows hadn’t done the street yet. It was one day, but it was a snow day, and maybe more than anything the pandemic steals time. It’s nice to steal it back.