4 The Covid-19 Pandemic and Its Effects on Schooling

The World Health Organization declared the outbreak of Covid-19 a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on January 30, 2020, and a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Little did anyone know that we would still be dealing with public health restrictions and the social, economic, and emotional costs of this pandemic more than two years later. Covid-19 and its various waves and variants have led to exceptional challenges for governments and policy makers throughout the world. In Canada, Covid-19 has caused provincial educational authorities to re-imagine the delivery of school curricula and support services to students in unprecedented ways. Various models of educational delivery were instituted: fully remote, on-line instruction during closures or by parent choice; blended online and face to face learning; and fully in-person instruction.

Prolonged school closures, physical distancing and masking requirements, reductions in educational support services for students with disabilities, have fundamentally changed schooling in Canada. Even something as rudimentary as accessing computer technology and/or reliable and affordable high-speed internet, through which on-line classes are delivered, has been a challenge in many parts of this country. For instance, in April of 2020, thousands of students in the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, one of the largest school divisions in Ontario, were advised to find their way to local school parking lots where they could access Wi-Fi hot spots (CBC, 2020). The challenges of accessing reliable internet connections may be exponentially compounded for students living in rural or remote service areas of Canada.

Kelly Gallagher-Mackay, Prachi Srivastava, et al., of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory panel (2021) report that, “Most evidence suggests a greater impact of school closures on vulnerable populations. Closures have interacted with other Covid-related hardships to disproportionately affect students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, racialized children and youth, newcomers, and students with disabilities” (p. 2). One of the most significant ways in which Covid-19 related school closures have impacted many families is the exacerbation of food insecurity. For many children, school is not only a place of learning, but also a place to eat. Many schools offer free or subsidized breakfast and/or lunch programs to their students. When schools are closed, the onus to provide an additional one to two meals a day falls to the home food budget which, in many families, may be stretched to the limit already.