The return to in-person learning for Halton students is being greeted with a collective sigh of relief from working mothers who spent the first five weeks of 2021 supporting their children’s all-day remote learning, while balancing employment.
Most Halton elementary and secondary students returned to in-person learning in Oakville Feb. 8.
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Happy to be back to in-person learning
Yolanda Yeung's children Vaughn (left) and Aria attend different schools.
Bronte resident Yolanda Yeung says her six-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter are both much happier to be back in physical school. “In the beginning, it was a novelty with online,” Yeung says. “But after about two weeks, they just had enough of it. My son was getting bored. He’d find ways to not be in class, where he would turn his video off, so the teacher couldn’t see him playing or doing something else. When we walked by his room you could hear him scrambling to get back to his screen. He’s much happier now to just interact with his friends.”
During the first lockdown back in March 2020, elementary students were typically left to do only short spurts of online learning, meeting once a day for an hour with teachers and classmates. After Christmas, with the province-wide lockdown, elementary students across the province were expected to attend full-day online classes.
Yeung and her partner both work in the banking sector and have been working remotely since the pandemic began. While she says there have been benefits, like saving two hours a day, and hundreds of dollars a month not commuting to their downtown Toronto offices, Yeung says it’s a relief not to be sharing the whole work day with her kids any more. “It was a nightmare, juggling everything.”
Part of the problem was that her children attend different schools with different schedules. She found herself setting alarms on her phone to keep track of when her kids were meant to be online, and who was on break. “From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. I had set eight alarms going off every day, for me to remind them to go back into class. My work day became very interrupted.”
Like Yeung, Lydia Ready is relieved schools have reopened. As an office manager for a construction firm, Ready says the school reopening has allowed her to return to work.
When schools went to online learning after Christmas, she negotiated a work-from-home arrangement with her employer but found it impossible to work at the level she wanted to while sharing space with her seven-year-old daughter and four-year-old twins.
“Remote learning was crazy,” Ready says. “I found myself being torn between doing my job the way I’m used to doing it, or helping my child who needed my help.”
Ready’s spouse is an essential worker who has been working outside the home since the pandemic began. And while her mother made herself available to babysit during Ready’s work day, the situation got too stressful for everyone. “My kids knew I was home, so they wanted me. I couldn’t be in a meeting. It was just impossible.” Junior kindergarten went okay for her twins, but for her Grade One child, it was a struggle. “She needed me beside her the whole day,” Ready says. “If I left her side, she was screaming she didn’t know how to turn something on.” It took three weeks before her daughter started to feel comfortable participating in the online environment.
Although children are now required to wear their masks outdoors during recess as well as all day in class, Lydia Ready says her three children are all much happier to be in class.
“It was a lot to ask for the kids to be home and not interact with other kids,” Ready says. For her twin four-year-olds, “That’s all they know. They’re in JK and school is wearing your masks all day.”
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Preschool, online
Lydia Ready's twins Mason and Olivia attend online school in the Ready family living room.
Kate Boland says her five-year-old is as grateful as she is that schools have reopened. Echoing Yeung’s experience, Boland says the first weeks of online school were going fairly well, with a teacher who was able to keep her engaged most of the day. “Towards the end, though, she was done. She was ready to not be online,” Boland says.
Like Ready, Boland found it stressful to be working at home while her young kids were at home. Sometimes she found the need to barricade herself behind a baby gate as a physical boundary to reinforce for her children that mom was at work, despite being just down the hall. “It’s really hard,” Boland says. “I had some mental health issues to start and I would say those have just been compounded (with Covid).”
The five weeks of remote learning for Boland’s family were just the topper to a year of ups and downs. “There’s just been so much change happening,” Boland says. “It’s been a roller coaster, and not a good one -- a roller coaster that didn’t pass its safety inspection!”
A couple days after the schools reopened, Boland’s husband Luke was laid off from his airline industry job. “Up until now, we’ve both been so lucky -- we had our jobs all this year. We’re doing what we can. It all just sucks.”
