CARPAY: No surprise — school absenteeism remains high after lockdowns

Neither the CBC nor anyone else should be surprised to learn that Canadian students are missing more class time in 2024 than they were in 2019. Starting in March 2020, children were locked out of their schools en masse, on-and-off for months on end. Lockdowns effectively taught children and their parents that in-person attendance at school was not important. Now the CBC reports that rates of “chronic absence” (missing two or more full days of school per month) are up significantly since 2019, especially among elementary students. Similar trends have been observed in the United Kingdom and the United States.Carleton University child psychologist Dr. Maria Rogers maintains that attending school regularly leads to better emotional health, better relationships with teachers, stronger social connections, and better academic achievement, all of this leading to healthy adulthood. According to the CBC story, Dr. Rogers points to high levels of anxiety as one reason kids are missing more school. Mental health has deteriorated significantly for everyone since 2020, especially youth: “Some people in my field are calling it a mental health crisis amongst youth worldwide.” Dr. Rogers says it’s likely children who were struggling before the pandemic with things like learning disabilities, ADHD or anxiety account for at least some of the increase in absenteeism: “… a lot of those kids did not do well with online learning, so they’re now further behind.”The CBC’s article asserts that locking children out of their schools for long periods of time “has had a lasting impact on attitudes toward school attendance,” and that “the extended periods of online school” have shown that kids don’t need to be physically present to keep up with their work.It’s refreshing to see the regime media speaking candidly about lockdown harms, even admitting honestly that lockdowns caused (or contributed to) the deterioration in mental health. However, the CBC won’t take this to the next level and address the elephant in the room: Were lockdowns worth the high costs, including harming children? Rather than seriously investigating this question, as honest journalists would do, the CBC concluded in early 2020 that lockdowns were reasonable, necessary, scientific, and fully justified. Having decided, without evidence, that lockdowns were saving thousands of lives, the CBC paid no heed to the harms that school closures inflicted on children, especially the most vulnerable, in 2020-2022. All government-funded media, not just the CBC, took the same approach to serious and numerous lockdown harms: do not investigate whether the lockdown cure is worse than the COVID-19 disease.Once the initial “two weeks to flatten the curve” in March of 2020 were concluded, why did politicians and government officials insist on continuing with further school closures, on-and-off, for the next 15 months?Ongoing school closures were based on two false claims. First, the Neil Ferguson claim that COVID-19 was an unusually deadly killer, on par with the Spanish Flu of 1918, that would soon kill 40 million people across the globe. The second false claim was that COVID-19 threatened everyone, including children.Dr. Ferguson’s dire predictions were fully discredited by May of 2020, just two months after lockdowns were first imposed. Those who actually looked at the death statistics posted on government websites (as opposed to watching scary photos of sick and dying people on the news) could see that COVID-19’s impact on population mortality was negligible; death rates in 2020 differed little from those in 2019. Likewise, the initial belief that COVID-19 threatened everyone was also fully discredited by May of 2020; the government’s own data made it clear that children were as likely to die of COVID-19 as they were to die of lightning strikes.Sadly, government-funded media promoted fear through the false claims that COVID-19 was an unusually deadly killer and that COVID-19 threatened everyone including children.Had enough people been willing and able to escape the paralysis of fear, and think clearly enough to reject false claims, we would have kept our schools open, and we would have spared a lot of kids from a lot of unnecessary suffering.John Carpay, B.A., LL.B. is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca)