CBC
Teachers warn that some students have left school and that it will be difficult to get them back
Toronto area high school teacher Kirby Mitchell has long focused his attention on students who have been classified as behavioral, who are frequently racialized, marginalized, and on the verge of leaving school entirely. He’s working to identify, support, and get them back into the school system, and in the midst of COVID-19, he’s increasingly worried about them. “Students who I used to wander around the halls are no longer there,” said Mitchell. “Students who I am used to playing in class are no longer there.” Enrollment numbers have fluctuated this school year, and students expected to attend are missing in both face-to-face and virtual classes. It’s not exactly clear how many go unreported, but according to public school boards and departments across the country, there could be a number of reasons why they didn’t show up: from kindergarten students who postponed the start to families who moved in Regions have moved or to private schools for children that are now home-schooled. Still, concerns are growing about the ability of schools to find students who do not attend the attendance lists – and the need to get them back into class quickly. With so much focus on school safety measures, offline students are not a priority, Mitchell says, and that can leave some feeling unwanted by the school community and make it easier for them to withdraw. Teachers say the pandemic has put a heavy strain on students’ ability to learn and some of them just checked out entirely. (Evan Mitsui / CBC) He says he can relate to this instinct based on his own school experience as a student. “I am mainly because of the sport and to get my friends to school,” he said. “Indirectly, I became part of a school and a learning environment, but if I didn’t have the reasons to come and have this space … Nobody is looking for me. I had no reason to go there. It’s just abandoned.” CLOCK | Mitchell explains why it’s easier to lose sight of students in the pandemic: Middle school teacher Jay Williams is hard to track down. From the beginning of September, the attendance list at his school in Toronto has become smaller and smaller. He was assigned 29 students on paper, but only 22 attended the class. In October, he lost four more students – children he knew would benefit from in-person learning – when they switched to virtual school and lost their connection with him and their home school community. It can be difficult to keep track of where students are going, he said. “Parents just pull their kids up and do home schooling? Are pods set up? … Have you changed the boards?” Middle school teacher Jay Williams has seen fewer students attend classes over the course of the pandemic, and says it can be difficult to figure out where they went. (Sue Reid / CBC) As the school year progresses, he hears from students who feel increasing. “Mentally, physically, emotionally checked out” and realizes how difficult it was for her to focus on studying, in the middle of the revolving door, to get to school and be quarantined home for COVID-19. Like many educators, he has called and emailed parents and families, and is open to chatting with students on social media in the hopes of maintaining connections and “making sure that all options are reached beforehand.” [they] Just stop coming. “Parents and caregivers are in survival mode,” Williams said, “dealing with it the best they can so the priority may not be to respond [to school officials]”WATCH | Schools need a student reintegration plan,” says Williams, “These can be rich as well as poor children.” Canada has been slow to realize that significant numbers of students are currently out of school and that absences are not considered a serious problem, says Irvin Studin, president of the Institute for 21st Century Questions, a Toronto-based think tank. “When we closed the schools here, we assumed everyone went online smartly because we were online ourselves. And we forgot that at least six percent of the population in Canada doesn’t have online access,” said Studin. Dropping out students may have done so for a variety of reasons, from those in vulnerable families to families whose finances have suffered from COVID-19 and prevented their children from accessing the tools necessary for teaching online . There may be students like Mitchell who have seen their previous connections with the school – friends, out-of-school groups and teams, mentors – who have disappeared among the pandemic. Some families, Studin said, chose to give their children a year (or two) break from school in the expectation that they would just make it up to them at a later date. Irvin Studin, president of the Think Tank Institute for 21st Century Issues, views the problem of missing Canadian students as an educational crisis that is unfolding in parallel with the economic and public health disaster of COVID-19. (Craig Chivers / CBC) “These can be rich as well as poor children,” he said. The institute of in, which works with colleagues in dozen of countries around the world, is pushing to raise the profile of this topic, which runs parallel to the ” economic disaster and public health disaster “developed by COVID-19. “We have to identify all of these children on a personal level by September and get them back to school,” said Studin. “We are pushing for real strategies with implementation apparatus to find and reintegrate these children.” UN Alerts on Impact of School Closures UNESCO is also alerting to the crisis affecting out of school children and youth around the world and the need to move forward to address the effects of school closings, learning loss and the adjustment required for educational systems. In August last year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described school closings in the context of pandemics as a potential “generational disaster that could waste immeasurable human potential, undermine decades of progress and exacerbate entrenched inequalities”. “This is a serious problem,” said Silvia Montoya, director of the Montreal-based UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). “The UN Secretary General has a full point.” Vulnerable and disadvantaged communities that had faced educational barriers before the pandemic have faced even greater challenges since then, Montoya said. She said that around 100 million children worldwide are falling below a minimum level of basic reading as a result of the pandemic. “This corresponds to all students [in 2018 ] It started with first grade on the planet, “she said. The good news, she said, is that you can fix the damage by finding ways to get kids back to school and” putting in place mechanisms to help that process “The longer we wait, the worse the situation gets.” We can’t afford to wait until the next school year to connect with retarded students and bring back missing students, said Karen Ebanks, the personal and has taught students online under a hybrid quadmester system in the York area of greater Toronto. “The longer we wait, the worse the situation gets,” she said. It was an unpredictable roller coaster ride where the opening and closing of personal courses make learning Ebanks, who teaches maths, said the student was bothering her. She has heard from colleagues that students are missing for days or show no commitment in class for the week hen and teachers and administrators unable to connect with families through phone calls or other means of contacting families. “As the students become more and more detached … the harder it becomes to bring them back,” she said. York area teacher Karen Ebanks is concerned that students are feeling hopeless and more likely to leave school during the pandemic, which will affect their future chances of success in the workplace. (Elagu Design Photography / Submitted by Karen Ebanks) Ebanks says she is concerned that the pandemic will make some students desperate and hopeless and more likely to give up their academic and academic achievements. “It will also affect their future paths in terms of future courses, future career options, and … their ability to be resilient,” she said. “If I don’t have them ready to deal with me, there is no opportunity for me to sit in and try … to put them on. They just aren’t there. And I think that’s a really big one , great fear: to achieve and have nothing in return. “
