It was the week before March break in 2020, and, as we all remember so clearly (or perhaps want to forget), the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was making its presence known in Canada.
Then vice-principal at R.L. Beattie Public School, Emily Caruso-Parnell said that week was “surreal,” as she put up respiratory hygiene posters and taught kids how to cough into their sleeves and wash their hands more often.
With the first COVID-19 case being announced in Sudbury, parents started picking up their kids and not bringing them back, and then the province announced that March break would be extended for two weeks.
“It was a big unknown, and nobody knew what was going to happen, and we just never came back,” said Caruso-Parnell, now an assistant professor in Laurentian University’s school of education.
Her students wouldn’t see the inside of their classrooms again that school year, with students pivoting to emergency remote learning.
Schools in Ontario would go on to be closed for a minimum of 27 weeks (135 days) due to COVID-19, disrupting three school years in a row.
As the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table said in 2021, “education and schooling in Ontario has been profoundly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic,” adding that “international evidence and emerging local evidence suggest school closures impact children’s academic achievement and lead to learning losses.”
So as we mark the five-year anniversary of the COVID-10 pandemic, what have the lasting impacts been on students in this province?
‘We were building the plane while flying it’
Caruso-Parnell, who has been an educator since 2001, was tapped by the Rainbow board as its principal of remote learning for the 2020-2021 school year.
She headed up efforts to develop programming for students whose parents had opted for fully remote learning due to the pandemic.
That was a “huge responsibility,” she said, and for teachers, it was like “producing a three-hour children’s television show every day.”
While the situation wasn’t perfect, these remote learning teachers were at least able to plan and build routines with their students, whereas with emergency online learning, “nobody chose that, right?” said Caruso-Parnell.
“It was just sort of like, ‘You can't go to school now, go home, and I'll see you online’,” she said. “It was a bit more of an emergency, and it was not by choice.”
In terms of the lasting impact of the COVID-19 years on students and learning in Ontario, Caruso-Parnell said “all of these things that existed prior to the pandemic, were dialed up by the pandemic.”
That includes an exacerbation of mental health concerns and school violence. She also agrees there was learning loss due to the disruptions.
“We were building the plane while flying it,” Caruso-Parnell said. “No one had ever taught in this way before … . So nobody knows what exactly the right things are, even if there is a right thing, Is there a right way to teach four-year-olds online? You know, there's the best you can do, and that's the best you can do.”
Now teaching at the post-secondary level, Caruso-Parnell sees that her students, who came of age during the pandemic, are much more comfortable with remote learning. But then, she’s seeing the successful ones in her classroom, the ones who graduated.
“What I'm seeing with my students, you can't necessarily generalize that to every student,” she said.
‘There were so many unknowns’
Now in her second year as superintendent of education with the Sudbury Catholic District School Board, Natasha Folino was the principal at St. Francis Catholic Elementary School in March 2020.
She also recounts the frantic environment of the beginning of the pandemic.
“There were so many unknowns, right?” she said. “So we were working through things, sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis, and always with the thought of supporting students and families through an unprecedented time of not knowing what was going on …
“I think that was one of the beautiful things of COVID, is that as school staff, we saw people really rallying and coming together, and thinking outside the box of like, how can we connect? How do we make sure that everybody is still feeling safe, welcome and able to access services as best as possible?”
Folino, who’s been working in education for 17 years, has seen a variety of impacts on students as a result of the pandemic, ranging from mental health issues to lowered attendance levels to a lack of socialization in students entering kindergarten.
With EQAO assessment tests not being administered during the pandemic, and with the test having changed format in the intervening years, she said it is difficult to use these tools to compare student achievement pre and post-pandemic.
The tests do show that “we still have some needs with regards to reading,” but with regards to the Grade 10 literacy test, “we’re doing very well in that,” Folino said.
She said the board has implemented some “strategic programming,” especially surrounding reading and math, “that helps meet students where they’re at and move them forward,” and also has tutors available, a program introduced during COVID by the province.
With the pandemic having an impact on students’ anxiety levels, and with mental well-being “significantly tied to academic learning,” the board focused on building back relationships and supporting students’ mental health, she said.
The board has addressed those concerns by adding more social workers and child and youth workers and “ensuring that each grade level of our schools has mental health programming built” in, she said.
A statement from the Rainbow District School Board said the board has worked hard to respond to the learning needs of students.
The board said it has worked hard to respond to the learning needs of its students, including on reading, writing and math to build strong foundational skills in students as they progress through the grades.
EQAO results have been trending upwards with incremental gains over time, said the Rainbow board.
The French Catholic board, Conseil scolaire catholique Nouvelon, said since the pandemic, the board has noted a significant increase in speech and language needs.
“There has been a growing demand for speech-language consultations and assessments in elementary students,” said Tracy Rossini, executive director of Learning at Conseil scolaire catholique Nouvelon, in a statement provided to Sudbury.com.
“The numbers of identifications have tripled for our Kindergarten students. In response to this increasing demand, CSC Nouvelon’s speech-language team has restructured its service plan to better respond to students’ specific needs.”
‘The greatest disaster affecting education in my lifetime’
Paul Bennett, a professor of education at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is the author of a November 2023 paper called “Pandemic Fallout: Learning Loss, Collateral Damage and Recovery in Canada’s Schools.”
Also associated with a couple of think tanks, including the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and his own organization, the Schoolhouse Institute, Bennett’s paper examines, as it puts it, the fallout from “education’s long COVID.”
“Education's long COVID is a whole generation of kids, the pandemic generation, that are between eight and 12 months behind in both intellectual and academic and social development and are showing incredible signs of what I call post-pandemic fallout,” Bennett told Sudbury.com.
“That's anxieties, fears, absenteeism, cellphone and social media addiction, and the inability to compete, to rise to the occasion, and basically just underperforming every other cohort.”
His paper elaborates that education’s long COVID “lingers on in the form of measurable learning loss, stunted social development, and mental-health side effects. Widening knowledge gaps, and attendant problems such as increased school violence and chronic student absenteeism, cry out for more visible, effective, better-coordinated plans for learning recovery.
“Learning loss is real, and the latest research confirms that a substantial learning deficit arose early in the pandemic and has persisted over time,” the paper continued.
“It is widespread, affecting students from elementary grades through high school, and is more pronounced in mathematics than in reading. Children with special needs suffered the most.”
Five years ago, Bennett said, “we were hit by the greatest disaster affecting education in my lifetime.”
COVID resulted in “total disruption, disarray, chaos, a mixture of online learning, take-home learning, battles over whether they'd use Zoom ... ,” he said.
“There was a kind of a fumbled and bungled implementation of the transition to remote learning, so that actually compounded the problems.”
Looking at current EQAO assessment results, Bennett is troubled, saying students just aren’t where they should be when it comes to both literacy and math.
Speaking of those still in the younger grades, “well, when were they born? … Their parents taught them. They're the result of what I call the pandemic generation of homeschool kids, right?” he said.
Beyond focusing just on mental health, Bennett said students need to be stimulated, and be presented with meaningful lessons when they get to school. And teachers need to be re-established “as positions of some authority in some schools.
But he predicts education’s long COVID “will stay with this generation, and it will be passed on to the next stage of education, and it will show itself in the workplace, because we are part of a journey,” he adds.
“I think they're going to continue to struggle. They've got the challenges of the contemporary world in the most acute form. They're the canary in the coal mine, or the worst example of what can happen when a generation is kind of failed by a school system.”
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s assistant editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.