Ontario’s 2021 budget confirms Doug Ford’s government is cutting $1.6 billion from education.
As PressProgress reported earlier this month, a Ministry of Education memo to Ontario school boards warned that a $1.6 billion funding cut was in store for schools heading into September 2021.
The memo, titled “2021-22 School Year,” shows Deputy Minister Nancy Naylor acknowledged the “extraordinary steps” educators have taken to support students during the pandemic, but emphasized boards should expect $1.6 billion less in support heading into September 2021.
The Ministry of Education characterized the funds as “temporary” in the memo, however, it also indicated the cuts would eliminate thousands of jobs for principals, teachers, early child educators and custodians.
During the pandemic, Canadians have been asked to stay home to stay safe, yet thousands of youth are facing homelessness. Each year in Ontario, 800-1,000 youth age out of the child welfare system.
In the early months of the pandemic, the Ontario Children’s Advancement Coalition (OCAC) and allied partners lobbied the Ontario government to stop the practice requiring youth to leave their care placements when they turn 18. In June 2020, the Ontario government placed a moratorium on this policy until March 31, 2021. Yet the pandemic continues and the clock is running out.
We research policy and work with youth and adults who are ensnared in the Canadian criminal justice system — many of whom have had contact with the child welfare system.
“Too many young people ‘age out’ to poverty, to homelessness. It’s a pipeline to the criminal justice system for some. And it exacerbates mental health conditions,” says Ratnam, co-founder of the non-profit Ontario Children’s Advancement Coalition (OCAC). https://t.co/MzP7WgHkj7
Children who are deemed by child protective services (CPS) as experiencing abuse or neglect may be removed from their caregivers and placed under the guardianship of the state. Based on 2011 census data, there are 11,375 children in the child welfare system in Ontario. Black and Indigenous children are highly represented, with Indigenous children comprising 30 per cent of kids in care in Ontario.
Many children and youth under state guardianship report moving among multiple homes and sometimes cities. Youth reported to us that they can count on having at least one move for every year that they’re in the child welfare system, and some move multiple times in a year. Frequent moves can disrupt education, resulting in low rates of high school completion. Youth who don’t complete high school face challenges and are more likely to experience poverty and rely on government assistance.
This instability can create low levels of attachment, trust and relationship-building. Many youth contend with mental-health challenges, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, that have an impact on their mental, emotional, social, spiritual, physical and occupational wellness and development. It’s unsurprising that many youth describe feeling vulnerable and angry in these circumstances. Often youth are labelled oppositional and criminalized due to the way they behave, but this is in response to trauma and their circumstances.
From a youth we interviewed:
“[Being in the child welfare system] really changed my character. It really just changed who I was as a person.… I’ve been in [at least] 20 different places and you know, it’s just so much [stuff]. And that’s the thing. Like all this stuff, people don’t realize … for somebody like me, I’ve been so thrown around, like [basically] tossed around, like here, there, everywhere.”
A CTV Report on aging out of foster care from March 2020.
Emerging adulthood
When youth under guardianship of the state turn 18, they are required to leave their foster care or group home placements. Some young people may continue to receive financial support after they turn 18 through the Continued Care and Support for Youth (CCYS) program. This financial support stops abruptly when they turn 21.
Psychologist Jeffrey Arnette’s theory of emerging adulthood recognizes a period of prolonged transition between late adolescence and fully independent adulthood. Emerging adulthood helps to explain shifting societal trends in recent decades.
Many emerging adults rely on their families for financial, housing and social support longer than in the past, often well into their 20s. More young people seek post-secondary education, face higher rates of unemployment and rising housing costs, and marry and have children at a later age, on average.
Despite these broader societal trends, currently youth in the child welfare system are required to leave their placements when they turn 18. While other young adults are able to gradually transition to independent adulthood, young people leaving care are abruptly forced into adulthood.
When asked how prepared they were for “independence,” one young person shared: “We all got like a Tupperware container, or a tub full of pots and pans and dishes and stuff like that. But yeah, there wasn’t really any preparation.”
Another added: “I just had to learn how to be a human on my own. Like, I had to learn everything that like a mom or like a parent or guardian is supposed to teach a kid from young.”
After the moratorium
Once the moratorium lifts on March 31, 2021, there will be a flood of young people leaving their homes and heading into a decimated housing and employment market.
Heather O’Keefe, executive director at StepStones for Youth, says:
“The devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have created further vulnerability for youth from the child welfare system with the lack of safe housing options, the loss of jobs, the inability to make rental payments and purchase essential items, and increased isolation and seclusion. The toll on the mental health of these youth has been exacerbated with the closure of libraries and schools, reduced services for people living in poverty, fewer opportunities to meet with counsellors and psychotherapists in person, and increased anxiety and suicide ideation.”
Our work with these young people underscores that the moratorium should be extended indefinitely. Rather than maintaining arbitrary age cut-offs for support, the provincial government should implement a readiness model.
This approach would work with every young person from the minute they enter the child welfare system to encourage better outcomes once they decide they are ready to be fully independent rather than being forced to leave care once they turn 18.
Youth leaving state guardianship have always been vulnerable. And with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, youth aging out of care will be in a much more vulnerable position, with potentially more severe impacts.
Cheyanne Ratnam co-authored this article. Cheyanne is the co-founder and executive lead of the OCAC, and an expert in the area of child welfare, homelessness and interconnected systems. Cheyanne also grew up in the child welfare system, experienced youth homelessness and was briefly engaged with the youth justice system.
Canada has one of the highest rates of adolescent suicide among countries — Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash
New rankings from the Canadian chapter of UNICEF say Canada’s children have worse physical and mental health than their peers in most other countries of comparable wealth.
The report shows Canada ranks 30th out of 38 countries when it comes to the well-being of children and youth under 18.
Meanwhile, a report from Children First Canada and the University of Calgary says the top 10 threats to childhood, which had been increasing over the past decade, are spiking further as a result of the pandemic.
These include mental illness, food insecurity, physical and sexual abuse and poverty.
Morley said Canada had one of the highest rates of adolescent suicide among countries included in the report, as well as a child mortality figure that belies the robustness of Canada’s overall health-care system.
LaGrange should disclose the epidemiological models used to anticipate consequences of both the current reopening plan and several alternatives, so they can be accurately compared.
The public has the right to hear how Alberta’s plan incorporates up-to-date data, verified by districts, about realities in schools. These include factors like class and room sizes; data on which mitigation measures such as smaller class size, better ventilation or medical-grade PPE for teachers could help stem viral spread and their costs. Where good data about the consequences of reopening don’t yet exist, there should be transparency, too.
We should also know what experts have been consulted, what concerns, ideas and recommendations they generated and how these were addressed and evaluated.
Transparency about data and expert recommendations are vital to an informed public. Transparency allows discussion and critique, and allows concrete conversation about risks the public is being asked to accept.
What is the prospect that children, family members or teachers will be hospitalized or die? What are best- and worst-case scenarios in terms of resultant casualties and community spread? The public should know what risks or potential costs everyone is being asked to bear.
Premier Jason Kenney has released few details about back-to-school plans, while emphasizing parent choice. In this photo, Jillian Reid, 9, works at home in Cremona, Alta., in March 2020, after schools closed. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
Transparency also allows parents to make informed choices and to develop a sense of confidence in how decisions are made not only now, but going forward.
Israel, for example, failed to reduce class size and saw an outbreak at a high school when schools reopened that infected hundreds. There were instructions for mask-wearing by students in Grade 4 and older, open windows, frequent hand washing and physically distancing students when possible. But with up to 38 children in classrooms, physical distancing was impossible, and under a heat wave, officials permitted windows closed for air conditioning and allowed a mask-wearing exemption. Are similar outcomes or decisions possible in Alberta?
Transparency also matters as it allows people to evaluate whether plans address and fund ethical requirements pertaining to school staff: adequate provisions so reopenings work logistically, adequate protection that ensures reopenings are maximally safe and adequate compensation for staff who are assuming risks.
Unanswered questions
We need answers to questions such as: How much does teachers’ risk increase in classrooms where social distancing cannot be maintained? Given risks, is hazard pay in order for school staff? If it isn’t — hopefully because projected risks are low — then how about a provincial payout for those who may nonetheless suffer serious illness or death in conjunction with a COVID-19 school outbreak?
That seems only fair and could contribute to confidence in what to expect.
In the end, transparency allows us to hold leadership accountable. Politicians and scientists can be wrong. If the public knows what the province’s projections are and accepts them, then it can be prepared for predicted bumps without losing trust in leadership. If the models turn out to be inaccurate or ethically unacceptable, the public deserves a change in course.
If requests for transparency go unanswered, Albertans must assume either that the scientific expertise behind decisions to open schools is inadequate, or that the education minister is failing to base her decisions on scientific expertise. Neither option is acceptable with so many lives at stake.
Every school has different furniture, but in recent years some
classrooms have intentionally moved away from individual desks towards
shared tables in the interest of fostering collaborative learning
environments, said one York region teacher who shares
Vamvalis’ concern.
The windows on Vamvalis’ floor do not open, and ventilation is poor.
Vamvalis lives with a chronic lung condition, and the air quality in her
school has always exacerbated the problem. Before the COVID-19
pandemic, she worked with the school’s caretakers to try to improve the
ventilation through regular filter changes with little success.
