The government of Ontario is currently looking for feedback on what to do with schools in September. The feedback e-mail is: EDU.consultation@ontario.ca (Include your name and the name of your school board/organization, use “Ontario’s Plan to Reopen Schools” in the subject line, attach your submission as a PDF or Word document.)
By Greg Woodruff
June 6th, 2020
BURLINGTON, ON
Ontario needs to provide options to parents. They need a mostly traditional school, a COVID-19-adapted school and a virtual school option for the upcoming years. Parents must be able to select the appropriate environment for children.
The primary problem is Ontario’s new Learning Framework presents the overarching priority to “ensure the utmost safety of those returning to school.” Safety must be balanced by social development and educational priorities.
Please imagine for a moment the parents’ goal of utmost safety. Your child requests a playdate with another child. When you call this child’s parent, they say that they can’t condone a playdate, as driving poses a minute risk to the safety of their child. Safety is their utmost priority. Even if you offer to drive your child over, reducing the astronomically small chance of harm to their child, a small risk still exists to others. After all, you can not guarantee a mechanical failure in your own car won’t pose a hazard to yourself or others. The other parent similarly bans unnecessary driving, walking outdoors, biking, playing, swinging, sports or even running. Any protests about the value of these activities are met with a simple reply: You must not care about the safety of your children as much as they do.
This idea — clearly pathological — when presented by a person with a healthy child, now seems to be accepted wisdom when presented by the school administration. While extreme safety may be appropriate in some cases, parents must make that decision. The goal of raising children is not to keep kids safe at all costs; it’s to prepare them for life. Without an assessment of benefit, no activity more than sleeping and eating can be justified. The reverse is also true; All restrictions designed around safety have to be balanced by the harm that limitations do.
He knows what he want to get done and is confident he will be able to do it.
I don’t think we should pretend that instead of encouraging kindergartners to share, now in the name of COVID-19, forbidding them from sharing items won’t hurt them. We are considering telling kids not to play with friends at school because those friends might be diseased. The long-term effects of these ideas on the socialization of children are unknown. Some kids lacking healthy development will likely lack social skills and die from deaths of despair later. I don’t see how you will easily remove these ideas once the threat is “minimal” because the threat to these children is below minimal now. COVID-19 is not a disease seen in children anywhere. We are already below any conceivable threshold of COVID-19 danger to children.
The idea that children can’t normally interact at no harm to themselves because they might later pass the disease on to others is not reasonable. If this is the fear, then interventions need to take place at the point of contact with vulnerable populations. It’s more efficient to place distancing or testing protocols when children visit grandparents then prevent two million school-age children from playing with friends and doing group work in class. We can’t force children to carry a heavy burden for others just because they don’t vote and can’t defend themselves. I realize that some parents or siblings will themselves be immunocompromised and need additional safety measures.
Students getting the play time, exploring and learning in a traditional school setting.
That is why we also need a COVID-19 adapted school. Some families will not be able to accept any risk, and virtual options are needed for them. I am not suggesting COVID-19 is something to be ignored; it just needs to be handled in a more customized way than one school solution meets all families’ needs.
Heath experts and school board staff should not be in a position to place kids in damaging environments. The burden of making tradeoffs falls alone on parents. Thus, I suggest we must let parents decide what situation represents the best fit for the kids they know. I suggest allowing parents to select if they prefer a mostly traditional environment for children, an environment with intrusive COVID-19 interventions or virtual school options. The administration can then select locations for each type of school for the next one or two years. The staff can similarly be asked which setting they prefer. Kids can then be bussed to the location that fits them. This is already done for four different school boards; surely, one more configuration is possible.
Simply relying on “health experts” to draw up school rules is not appropriate. Although they may be disease experts, they are almost certainly not experts in the education and development of children. Without being an expert in children, they cannot evaluate the harm caused by COVID-19 measures correctly. If no harm is recognized now, then there is no incentive for removal later. As time goes on, more children will be exposed and have immunity naturally. We could end up with highly tortured school environments where 99% of children are immune to COVID-19, but where we have no structure to normalize school.
We have to face the fact that for political reasons, many proposed COVID-19 measures will likely go on for years. COVID-19 interventions do not represent some response to a temporary emergency. In September, COVID-19 will have been present in our community for six months. The best case is then another year or two to a vaccine. Perhaps we will never have a COVID-19 vaccine. Thus, the damage to children is occurring over the years of developmental time and is likely permanent.
Any interventions established as the “new normal” will be demanded by some number of parents forever, even if COVID-19 is eradicated.
As an example, let’s say “no gym” in the name of possible transmission of the disease. If you try to restore gym class later, any parent in the school can now say, “Gym is now a danger to my child. The school board has defined it so.” Even if the risk of flu is low to them, it risks spreading the flu to Grandma, whose immune system is compromised. This is the same logic used to justify interventions now. Once “gym” is defined as a danger now under what construction is, it no longer dangerous? Again, COIVD-19 does not affect children at any significant rate.
Is the day of the happy student charging off the school bus to get to the classroom behind us?
I would put forward that some easy COIVD-19 interventions can be added to schools without damaging the social development of children. Measures like preventing febrile children from attending, washing hands every hour or disinfection of shoes when entering school grounds should be taken. It’s not that COVID-19 transmission should be ignored; it’s that heavy interventions that damage the normal social growth of children should not be globally applied without parental approval.
Ontario needs to support families by providing the school environment best suited to them. Three options need to be provided: traditional school, COVID-19 adapted school and virtual school.
Greg Woodruff is an Aldershot resident with children at the elementary school level. He is an active participant in social issues and has run for public office on more than one occasion
