June 23, 2022
A June like all the other Junes
It’s been three years since we’ve had a June like this June, a June like all the other Junes before it. My kids walking to school in shorts and sandals, spring light shining through lush green trees into their classroom windows, and the calendar packed with dates for the school picnic, school dances, graduation, and end-of-the-year trips. If my email inbox is any indication—packed with calls for bake sale contributions, teacher gift collections, volunteers and chaperones—nature, as they say, is healing.
If all goes according to plan in the next week, the 2021-22 school will turn out to have been something close to normal, two weeks of virtual learning aside, albeit with two-thirds of it spent in cohorts, high schoolers in those ungainly “quadmesters,” the experiment that has been hybrid learning, and mask requirements. Some of these strategies for reducing infection have been more effective (and less disruptive) than others, but I’m grateful for those that worked, for the gift of vaccines, and for the incredible dedication of teachers and school staff which has meant our kids get to go to school every day, see their friends, learn in person, play at recess, and all the other normal things that all kids should get to do.
As a parent in Ontario, a province whose children have spent more time out of the classroom since March 2020 than anywhere else across the country, something close to a normal school year is a gift I will never take for granted.
But I also remain frustrated that too many voices—some of them prominent, loud, and speaking with real authority—have spent the last two years and more insisting that such success was unachievable. These failures of imagination have had real consequences for children and families across the province, and served to undermine progressive values, faith in public health, and the possibilities of our collective efforts.
In 2020, however, some of this seemed understandable. So much was still unknown about Covid-19, with limited medical treatments available, and vaccines far off on the horizon. And so, even as students across Europe began returning to school in the spring of 2020, students in many Canadian jurisdictions would finish up their school year online, in Ontario this setting a most unfortunate precedent.
It didn’t help that bad-faith actors came to hijack the conversation so that questioning restrictions like school closures started to seem like possible shorthand for not taking the Pandemic seriously. Or that our media was so US-centric that it was hard to see examples of Covid being managed any way but terribly. It didn’t help either that, in Ontario, the government was slow-moving on measures to improve school safety, and then rolled out a program for virtual learning that made parents feel like they were being forced to pick between two not-great choices. To complicate matters further, by September 2020, Ontario was coming out of a year of labour disruptions by teachers and school staff, which meant tensions were high and political rifts deeper than ever. In particular, I recall a tweet from exclusive private high school St. Michael’s College School, of which Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce was an alumnus, spotlighting gleaming new handwashing stations and plexiglass room dividers. Meanwhile public school students were being promised six feet of distance between desks in classrooms where there was literally not enough space to accommodate such dimensions—the disconnect was pretty staggering.
Sending my children back to school September 2020 was a nerve-wracking endeavour, but it was a choice whose risks we felt comfortable taking since no one in our household had a health condition that made them vulnerable, my husband and I both working from home meant our chances of spreading the virus were low, and—I think, most essentially—because we were already well connected to our local public school whose staff we trusted absolutely to help keep our children safe.
But we were still nervous, and I soon realized that I would have to quit Twitter in order to have my kids attend school without my mental health being compromised, because all the voices on that platform—from doctors, and people who thought they were doctors because they followed doctors, and activists, and politicians, and pundits—were just too much for me to handle.
I also ended up leaving the several parental advocacy groups I’d followed in previous years to show my support for public education, mostly because they too were piling on the Twitter hyperbole and using every opportunity to get a shot at our ding-dong government. (The thing about ding dong governments is that you’re always going to get a shot, so you actually have to be discriminating at going about it or else it stops having meaning.)
The low point, for me, came when I sent a DM to a representative from one of these groups, which was then keeping tabs on daily case counts of Covid cases reported in Ontario schools. (A number that was, in retrospect, so low that it almost seems quaint now.) And I inquired to the representative as to whether they were perhaps stoking fear and anxiety in sharing these numbers outside of the context of what a small proportion of students these cases actually represented, and—even more important—that school spread really didn’t seem to be a factor.
“Let’s engage with reality, rather than just trying to push your narrative, because that undermines your credibility,” was basically what I was saying, but this person was uninterested in that. Responding that the numbers were likely undercounted anyway, and that I was being ableist and racist in denying the impact of Covid, since it disproportionately affects the most vulnerable in our communities.
The latter point most certainly the case, but doesn’t that just underline the importance of dealing in facts and not engaging in inflammatory rhetoric? Because the stakes really are that high.
You’d think people might have learned something from September 2020, when schools reopened and everyone lost their minds, but we didn’t. In Ontario, schools closed again after the Christmas holidays, students returning to their classrooms for about six weeks, and then schools closed a second time after delayed spring break. I recall commenting on Facebook that it might be nice if schools could just reopen for a few weeks in June for just a bit of closure, so we didn’t just keep adding to the trauma of everything having ended so abruptly two years in a row, and other people shouted my point down. It just wasn’t worth the risk. It wasn’t possible, they reported with a glib kind of nihilism. People who lived in Twitter far more than they actually went out into the world telling me how it was, because they’d seen it in their timelines.
Children returned to school again in September 2021 with a virulent new strain on the rise, and again in January 2022, and each time I couldn’t help but think how advocates and experts had squandered so much of their capital by making something massive out of the challenges of September 2020. So that by the time spring 2022 rolled around and everything was so much worse, nobody was listening to them anymore. At a moment when advocacy was necessary, most normal people, altogether pandemic-weary, had tuned it all out. Because of the Public Health Twitter star whose open letter in January 2022 predicted “sudden mass infection” and effects that would be “catastrophic.” The people who’d decided that medical experts advocating for schools to reopen were in kahoots with Doug Ford and developers to destroy the green belt. The hysterical Instagram power-points warning when children returned to school after March Break, “STUDENTS ARE GOING TO DIE. TEACHERS ARE GOING TO DIE.” Until the messaging was just as uninformed and divorced from reality as that of anti-vaxxers.
It’s not that people were wrong that bothers me. Surely all of us are glad that the most dire predictions regarding Covid-19 often did not come to be. I understand too that this has often transpired because of urgent messaging which led members of the public to change their behaviour, changing trajectories for the better. It’s how public health is supposed to work.
But I am bothered by the lack of reflection by people with prominent platforms. I am angry that a curious combination of cowardice, defeatism and self-righteousness led to children in our province being out of school for months during periods where we were free to eat and drink in bars and restaurants. I am angry that the same people were wrong again and again, and that all those same people are still furiously tapping away at their Twitter feeds, never once displaying an ounce of humility or contemplating the remotest possibility that not everything is going to end in disaster.
All this matters because we live in a moment of enormous challenge on a variety of fronts, and our society is certainly never going to be able to meet these if how we grappled with Covid in schools is the precedent. If our most prominent voices continue to be steeped in cynicism, egotism, more adept at criticism than anything constructive, more concerned with amplifying their own voices, messages, and political agendas than actually listening, and learning, and figuring out how together we can make things work.
Because we can make things work—the success of 2021/22 is a testament to that. And I don’t know if it would be so unwise, when the next big crisis rolls around, if we just let school teachers and staff be the ones to tell us all how to solve it, and everybody else can be quiet for once.
