Post-Pandemic Education: Should Online Learning be a Permanent Fixture in the K-12 School System?

A draft Ministry of Education document, leaked to the Toronto Globe and Mail on March 24, 2021, has, once again, stirred the pot in the volatile Ontario education debate over expanding online learning courses. After a year of school shutdowns and off-and-on online learning, the document revealed that Education Minister Stephen Lecce was considering legislation to make “remote learning” a “permanent part” of the K-12 public system.

News that online learning was here to stay was hardly earth-shaking, but it aroused the usual fears of a ‘hidden agenda’ at Ontario’s Queen’s Park. Was it a way of promoting and advancing “parent choice” or the thin edge of the wedge leading to “privatization’ of public education?  Whatever the motivation, the online learning “boogeyman” was back, a year after the first round of controversy, cut-short by COVID-19 and the abrupt transition to emergency home learning.

Minister Lecce seized the high ground in confirming that online learning would continue in post pandemic times. Keeping schools open for in-person schooling would remain the priority, but plans were afoot to ensure that, in September 2021, parents would be given the opportunity to enroll their children in “full-time synchronous remote learning.” In post-pandemic education, online learning would continue to be utilized to ensure “continuity of learning,” to “mitigate learning loss,” and to provide students with access to a wider range of courses.

Ontario’s teacher union leaders reacted as expected, slamming the move, and especially the absence of any prior consultation with frontline educators. “The move to virtual learning was never intended to be permanent: it was a temporary measure intended to deliver emergency instruction during a global health crisis,” claimed Sam Hammond, President of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO). The proposed plan would, he charged, “ negatively affect students, increase inequalities, lower standards…and put us one step closer to the privatization of public education.” Ontario Secondary School Federation president Harvey Bischof was more measured in his criticism, but asked to see evidence that online learning worked to the benefit of students.

The online genie is out of the bottle and will not likely ever be contained or rationed as a supplement to regular programs again. In the case of Ontario, some 400,000 of the province’s 2 million students or 20 per cent have experienced online learning during the 2020-21 school year. While regular in-person learning is far superior for most students, there’s a good argument to be made for expanding course offerings online.

Integrating online courses into the regular program makes good sense, knowing what we now do about the potential for mass disruptions affecting in-class learning time. The final revenge of COVID-19 may strike again, and having an implementable e-learning plan will be part of all future strategic planning in public health and K-12 education. With the capacity to offer comparable virtual learning, for short periods, it’s hard to justify repeated snow day school closures or shutting down operations for a whole range of calamities, including hurricanes, floods, windstorms, boiler meltdowns, or seasonal flu epidemics.

What the Ontario government was proposing back in 2018-19 looks quite different in the light of the COVID-19 educational disruption. The initial Doug Ford government plan to require high school students to complete four online courses from Grades 9 to 12 provoked a firestorm of opposition. It was eventually scaled-back to 2 courses required for graduation. Three courses suggested as online offering possibilities were good ones, Grade 10 career choices, Grade 11 biology, and Grade 12 data management.

What a difference a year makes in K-12 education. Integrating online learning courses into the regular high school program looked radical, scary and disruptive in February of 2020, on the eve of the pandemic. Ontario’s largest school district, Toronto District School Board, not only publicly condemned Minister Lecce in February 2020 for proposing required online courses, but commissioned a teacher- parent – student survey clearly aimed at torpedoing such a plan. Without any real experience in online learning, 81 per cent of parents and 97 per cent of secondary school teachers opposed what were labelled “mandatory e-learning courses.”

What have we learned since the pandemic turned education upside down? Keeping children in school should be the highest priority because its far superior to online substitutes and even compared to the most engaging live stream lessons and videos. The core mission of schools is to provide academic learning, but today’s education includes a far wider range of learning supports and mission-critical psycho-social services. Missing in-person schooling for weeks on end deprives students and families of important lifelines and aggravates socio-economic inequities.

Integrating virtual learning into K-12 education has become the new post-pandemic education imperative. “Continuity of learning” is now more than an aspirational educational catch-phrase when we have the capacity to shift, much more comfortably, from in-person to mixed hybrid or full-time virtual learning. Completing full courses online, much like regularly logging onto Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Webex platform-supported programs, will become more commonplace and, in time, become a normal expectation for students, teachers and parents everywhere. We have seen the educational future and it includes online learning.

Why does expanding online learning still spark fierce resistance in Canadian school systems? How well did school systems do in transitioning to alternative modes of delivery, specifically hybrid learning and full-time online learning? To what extent was Pandemic Education emergency home learning a fair test of the potential for effective e-teaching?  Is it possible to turn back the clock after absorbing the lessons of the pandemic?

 

Read Full Post »

Teen Mental Health Services: What’s Standing in the Way of Connecting the Dots?*

Dots can be hard to connect, especially when it comes to addressing teen mental health in New Brunswick. Ten years ago, some 1,200 parents and ordinary citizens launched a movement to create a Centre for Excellence for children and youth with complex needs. In the wake of the tragic death of 13-year-old Lexi Daken, it’s fair to ask why, since then, so little has changed for teens in crisis.
The images of that day stay with you. Mobilized by Fredericton parent Maureen Bilerman, hundreds of Dots for Youth advocates descended upon downtown Fredericton to form a human chain, connecting the dots, fingertip-to-fingertip, from the Victoria Health Centre to the Provincial Legislature. That demonstration was sparked by an equally disturbing personal story, but it drew powerful inspiration from a truly ground-breaking report, Connecting the Dots, produced in February 2008 by then Child and Youth Advocate Bernard Richard.
What happened over the past decade is a cautionary tale packing some profound lessons. Shocking and disturbing incidents stir outrage, visionary plans for systemic change appear, the momentum dies down, competing regional interests’ surface, and it all comes unraveled en route to effective implementation.
“Sadly, not much has really changed, “says Bernard Richard, looking back over the past ten to twelve years. “We are still a long way from achieving the goals and implementing the recommendations set out in Connecting the Dots. Despite repeated commitments, revolving door governments, not much has transpired in filling the holes in our community-based network of support for teens in crisis.”
Richard’s report proposed systemic reform, far ahead of its time. Breaking with the conventional social service model, he singlehandedly put “integrated service delivery” on the child and youth services agenda. Back then, it was considered revolutionary to recommend reengineering the system to focus on student needs rather than the priorities of competing government departments.
Seeing that children and youth at-risk were falling through the cracks, Richard proposed integrating services and focusing psych-social- medical resources. “The one child, one file” concept made perfect sense, but takes years to put in place in a siloed system. “Everyone should have access to the same case file, and no one should have to tell their story over and over again,” he insists. “No one would be missed if there was true integrated support and one case manager per file.”

Successive governments, Liberal and Conservative, have bungled the most important file – the proposed Centre for Excellence, one critically-important project which had the potential to turn the situation around in child and teen mental health services. From 2011 to 2015, a province-wide network for service excellence gained momentum and a consensus formed around locating the hub in Moncton or Fredericton, closest the hospitals with youth psychiatric services.
The May 2015 provincial decision, since rescinded, to build a Centre for Youth Services in Campbellton, essentially ignored the demographics of teen mental health case-loads and ran counter to the vast majority of the community feedback.
Long-time advocates like Dots.NB founder Maureen Bilerman were distraught over the decision and its ramifications. “It’s a sad day for families and youth in crisis,” she said in a series of media interviews. “Shock, disbelief and disappointment” were the words she used to describe her reaction. “Most of the youth-at-risk are from the urban centres of Saint John, Moncton, or Fredericton, and it makes no sense, so it must be a political decision.”
Political advocacy for teen mental health reform may not have reshaped the system, but it has continued to raise awareness and generate plenty of activity. When Bilerman chose to step back, after a decade of pressing for change, her Dots NB organization merged with the longer-established Partners for Youth Alliance, also based in the provincial capital.
Youth in Action mental health activities peaked in the 2018-19 school year, just prior to the pandemic. Some 74,400 students were exposed to mental health activities, held province-wide for two days, dubbed “Ring a Bell” and “Bell Let’s Talk.” Specific programs were delivered in 7 high schools, and some 200 students participated in one-time mental health presentations.
Most students surveyed gave the high school mental health sessions an “Apple” rating, indicating that they found them to be positive experiences. Raising awareness is beneficial, but reaching the students most in need of help remained as elusive as ever.
The Pandemic dealt a significant blow to such school initiatives. School closures in March of 2020 interrupted communications and the Partners for Youth group reportedly experienced “radio silence” from youth and educators in the partnered schools. Students and teachers were, according to the agency, “overwhelmed” and “treading to keep their heads above water.”
School shutdowns adversely affected those who needed guidance, counselling, and supports the most. The Partners for Youth 2019-20 annual report put it rather bluntly: “Many students who had difficulties with Mental Wellness ahead of school closures had fallen off the school’s radar completely.” That has the makings of a youth social service crisis.
The Fredericton agency’s Executive Director John Sharpe has seen it all, over thirty years working with youth-at-risk. Many investigations and reviews have echoed the findings of a 2009 report by Justice Michael McKee, all painting a similar picture of a system that’s “overwhelmed, understaffed and inadequate for the care of youth.”
“We don’t want to rebuild the system,” Sharpe recently commented. “We want a new system… we want a transformed system. What that means is we have youth, family and community at the centre.” Waiting for champions has turned this reform drive into an exhausting decathlon.
The road to youth mental health reform is paved with good intentions, but initiatives either run out of high-test gas, are diverted into cul-de-sacs, or get co-opted by research groups chasing government grants. Far too many reform initiatives end up being ‘studied to death’ or kicked down the road through the commissioning of yet another government report.
What’s really standing in the way of the needed changes? “The outrage is now at an all-time high,” according to Dots for Youth founder Bilerman. “What we lack,” she believes, “is the capacity for transformational change management. Models exist and we could pull it off here in New Brunswick.” Let’s hope the ‘Powers That Be’ are listening.

*Reprinted from the Telegraph-Journal (Provincial), 12 March 2021.

Why does it take a teen mental health tragedy to draw attention to the serious gap in services? What is standing in the way of meaningful action and progress? How typical is New Brunswick of the situation elsewhere?

Read Full Post »