Schools should remain open “unless there is a massacre”

“Barring a carnage, I don’t think the schools will close. »

Louise Leduc
The Press

This is the prediction of Dr. Caroline Quach, pediatrician, microbiologist and infectiologist at CHU Sainte-Justine.

The school year, marked once again by interruptions, by rushed and then lengthened holiday vacations and by numerous occasional absences of infected students and teachers, is drawing to a close.

All this has had serious repercussions, which were addressed Friday in Montreal at a conference organized by the Observatory for the education and health of children.

From the start of the school year in the fall, believes the D^D Quach (one of the participants of this conference), it’s a safe bet that there will already be a good number of cases. The less severe health restrictions than last year are very likely to lead to an upsurge in cases faster than in 2021, when we had done fairly well until December.

Despite this, according to her, unless there is a new variant that would completely change the situation, new school closures are not in the cards of Public Health.

Because this time, she believes, thanks to vaccines, we are not as vulnerable. Antivirals can also save us from the worst situations at the start of the pandemic.

“The pandemic is not over, but we are no longer in the same place [que lors des vagues précédentes] “, she launched.

At his side, the D^D Marie-France Raynault, a physician specializing in community health and public health, agreed. As long as we stay roughly at Omicron, “we are on a mitigation strategy, that is to say protecting the health system and the most vulnerable without necessarily imposing significant population measures”.

To avoid too many class closures in the future, perhaps we should also, according to her, consider reviewing the definition of an outbreak – at least two related cases – which, she says, “was very strict”.

School, essential for socialization

Dominic Besner, director of the Calixa-Lavallée school, in the borough of Montreal-Nord, really hopes that we are elsewhere. “School shouldn’t close,” he said, adding that the hybrid mode was also “a very bad idea” which was “magical thinking”.

Hélène Lecavalier, teacher of 4^e year in the Laurentians, noted for her part that she and her colleagues observed “a drop in interpersonal skills, an increase in stress and a decrease in respect towards peers and towards adults”.

And that’s not counting the delays in reading, she notes, and the students who, in calligraphy, still hold their pencil badly when the thing would have been corrected in person.

These academic delays are highlighted by a study of researchers from the Observatory for the Education and Health of Children and the CHU Sainte-Justine. They calculated (based on the results of the Ministry’s examination in reading of 7500 pupils of 4^e year out of 12,000) that the pandemic has lowered the average grade 4 student by more than 8 percentage points^e primary year in the ministerial test of 2021 (from 77.4% to 68.9%) compared to 2019.

“We have emerged from the chaos, but we are not yet back to normal”, and the students still have a lot of catching up to do, recalled Carla Haelermans, professor specializing in economics of education from Maastricht University.

In the Netherlands, where she is, Carla Haelermans estimates that the average learning loss after two years of the pandemic is now eight weeks. In her country, academic delays are particularly significant in mathematics and spelling, delays which have not been reduced between the first and second year of the pandemic, she worries.

Kristof De Witte, professor specializing in economics of education at the Catholic University of Louvain, noted for his part that in Belgium, the delays in learning are particularly evident in the teaching of the mother tongue and the language second.

But contrary to what is observed in the Netherlands, Mr De Witte points out that so much attention has been devoted to vulnerable students that the biggest drops in grades are observed among young people who usually have the strongest results. .

Tutoring, the preferred solution

How to improve the situation? The researchers are all pointing in the same direction: tutoring.

More than repeating a year, more than limiting the number of pupils per class, more than any other pedagogical measure, tutoring appears, according to the studies, to be the path to follow absolutely, insisted Mr De Witte, especially since it is also the least expensive.

He also points out that in Belgium, “summer schools have been very successful in helping the most vulnerable to limit school delays”.

“We must not just put ourselves in catch-up mode, we must aim to do better,” concluded Mr. De Witte.