EDITORIAL: We must do better for our kids

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Young people, disproportionately, have been the human collateral damage of the pandemic.

While it’s true that, tragically, vulnerable seniors in long-term care died, there will be an accounting for what went wrong. Already governments are studying new ways to care for the elderly.

What’s unspoken is the learning deficit our young people have suffered over the past 20 months. Online learning, especially for the younger grades, is no substitute for in-class lessons. Small children with short attention spans cannot focus on a screen.

Parents know this intuitively, but it’s been etched into grim relief by a Fraser Institute/Leger poll of parents of students from Kindergarten to Grade 12 across the country, released Nov. 30.

Ontario schools were closed longer than any other province and one in five Ontario parents — 20% — say their child has fallen behind because of school closures triggered by the pandemic. Almost the same number say the same thing nationally. What’s troubling is that a large number of parents aren’t confident their child’s school has a catch-up plan in place.

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Only 29% of parents said the pandemic had minimal impact on their child’s education. Almost 70% of parents said their child’s education had suffered, although some reported there’s a remedial plan in place.

The pandemic hit the most vulnerable hardest — the poor and those people with few resources to support their children at home.

School boards across the country should be required to have testing and recovery plans in place, so students can be assessed and supported.

Instead of focusing on children, Canada’s largest school board, Toronto District School Board, is on a power trip that has nothing to do with pandemic recovery. In the middle of the biggest crisis to hit schools in living memory, TDSB is busy censuring a Jewish trustee for calling out antisemitism in school board materials. It’s also banning a Nobel laureate, who escaped ISIS, from speaking at a book club, for fear of “Islamophobia” — although the board later distanced itself from that decision.

Our children are our future. Their education should be a priority, not an afterthought.

We must do better. And we must never, ever, keep our young people out of the classroom with no plan for recovery.