In BC, the kids are not alright

CLIP You are listening to a Frequency podcast network production.

Jordan Heath Rawlings The pandemic may not be over, but the restrictions that changed so much of our lives. Have vanished. There are no lockdowns. Schools are open everywhere. And look, you don’t even have to wear a mask now if you don’t want to. This is a touchy subject I realize, but it is pretty obvious that for a lot of us, things really are back to normal, but that’s just on the outside, inside. All of us are still scarred in one way or another, and in British Columbia right now, there are alarm bells ringing loudly inside schools. It can’t be completely attributed to the pandemic, and this is a phenomenon difficult to quantify. And hard to get to the bottom of. But if you ask teachers and counselors and parents, and anyone who works with or lives with school-aged children, they will all tell you what they’re seeing. The kids are not all right. I am Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is the big story. Sonya Aslam and Mike Lloyd are reporters with City News 1130 based in Vancouver. They just completed a five-part investigative series titled The Kids Are Not Alright. Hello, Sonya and Mike.

Sonya Aslam Hello.

Mike Lloyd Sonya, I wanna start with you first. Maybe just tell us what made you decide to dig into this project? What were you hearing and and who were you hearing it from?

Sonya Aslam I mean, we were hearing a number of reports that things were not quite normal across the education system. And again, I’m not just talking about teachers necessarily. It was community group leaders. It was parents, it was people in both of our circles who we know who have children. In the public education system who were all saying that, you know, something’s just not sitting well, children, children are not adjusting. There’s something going on. And then we thought, okay, let’s take a, you know, a deep dive into this. And we took a closer look and two and a half months later, the result of this investigation was incredible.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Can you give me some specific examples of what you mean when, when you talk about what kids or parents or teachers were concerned about, like what was actually happening or has happened?

Sonya Aslam So we were hearing a lot of reports of violent disruptions in the classroom, and I think that’s something that we don’t hear a lot about in this country specifically. But when you hear of a child, you know, outbursts, it’s maybe there’s a tantrum, but a violent outburst is a very different thing, especially when it comes from a point of frustration. And what we were hearing quite a bit of is a lack of resources. So, um, that was the key thing that we heard about from parents and teachers and counselors and everyone we talked to was the lack of resources is causing just a lot of anger in the classroom. So, you know, there’s either little or no access to special education educators and frankly, there was just a lot of heartbreak from the point of view of parents. I spoke to a number of parents, I mean, each one of them cried just out of the inability to help their child deal with the day-to-day in school when they’re not in their presence. And it was just really hard. Just, there’s just a lot of heartbreak from the point of view of parents. There’s a lot of challenges facing these children, and these parents are struggling to get answers and they’re struggling to get help for their kids. And what’s really difficult is they watch. And they’re not able to keep up with the needs of their child. And as a parent, that’s really hard because you’re not in school every day with your children. You’re not able to see what’s really going on. And when you see the consequence of it at home, that’s a really tough pill to swallow.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What’s changed that parents or educators might blame for this? And I say that I, I know lack of resources is one of the causes here, lack of resources in a public school system is not a new thing. What’s changed, uh, to cause this behavior, at least according to parents and teachers?

Sonya Aslam I think honestly, there’s two things that kept coming up. It’s a lack of funding. It’s a lack of resources, and both of those things go hand in hand. You know, when you have children who are displaying, and not just a few children, we’re talking across the province, thousands of students who are displaying things like just high levels of anxiety, a lack of emotional wellbeing, and overall really concerning mental health issues and not being able to learn properly in a classroom. Those two things, those two solutions kept coming back, which is money and resources. If you don’t have the help on the front lines to help these kids deal with these issues, then what are we doing here? And at the end of the day, what’s happening is these children are not getting access to the education. Not only that they need, but that they displaying overall mental health issues, those two solutions kept coming back, money and resources. And at the end of the day, these kids are not getting access to the education that they deserve.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And we’re gonna talk about the ways that can change in exactly how strapped these schools are, but I guess what I’m getting at is what’s driving that behaviour? You’re describing, you know, the anxiety, the outbursts, the difficulty following rules, that kind of stuff. Where do they think that’s coming from?

Sonya Aslam So I think one thing that we should make clear, and I’m not sure if everyone remembers pre-pandemic days, but these issues that we were hearing about the mental health concerns, the high levels of anxiety, the lack of emotional wellbeing, these were all issues before the pandemic hit in March, 2020, and then things got worse, and worse, and now we’re really seeing what that looks like in a classroom full-time. All of those things existed. They existed a decade ago. They just never got the attention that they’re now getting because now we’re seeing it firsthand. We’re seeing the violent outbursts and reports of issues in classrooms. So this has been a standing issue, it sounds like, from all the experts we spoke to, it’s only now really being understood. By the pandemic, and I think that’s something that we didn’t realize. We’re now, as we slowly come out of Covid 19 and this pandemic, we’re starting to see the consequences of, you know, high levels of screen time and lots of isolation and being stuck at home. And when these kids were sent home from school for weeks and weeks and weeks, that isolation, is not going well. And now we’re seeing that in the classroom. It’s playing out in real time. So I, I mean from everything that we’ve heard from, and again for the, from the province’s point of view, they did a couple of surveys here last year and the year before just to get people’s input about how Covid-19 and the restrictions affected their lives. And everything that came out of it showed that children specifically, were not doing great. Their mental wellbeing started dropping drastically during Covid, and there’s a few reasons for that as well. There’s child poverty, there’s social media, there’s environmental factors, but we also saw increased cases and levels of eating disorders, uh, specifically among girls in the LGBTQIA2S+ community. So there were a number of things again that were happening pre-pandemic, and then things have just increasingly gotten worse.

Jordan Heath Rawlings I’m gonna turn to Mike now. Um, Mike, I know you’ve, uh, spoken to people in schools and spoken to people who are looking at this problem. How do we sort of examine the big picture here? How can we make the distinction between, uh, incidents that happen in schools and, and are isolated and like a pattern in the school age population as a whole? What kind of data, if any, do we require?

Mike Lloyd Well, we, we didn’t necessarily look at data. This is more about anecdotal evidence from, from teachers and parents and uh, and professionals. And that’s a very good question. I mean, there were some teachers that even questioned it. You know, is this just something that I’m seeing in my group, in my kids, particularly at the younger grades, grades one and two. These teachers were seeing sort of a marked difference in their classes this year compared to some of the previous years. And these are the youngest kids who maybe spent some of their formative years, important formative years at home, preschool, maybe not getting the same kind of socialization. Socialization as they would’ve, you know, pre pandemic. They’re not seeing the other kids, the play dates are gone. They’re not out doing music classes, uh, or even just being out with their parents at the coffee shop and seeing sort of normal interactions. So the answer is that, that it’s just the broad amount of evidence that teachers saw. There were so many stories, and as we spoke to more teachers, you know, more would approach us. And, and it seemed to be such a, a, a common problem across these grades. You know, they, they were seeing a delay, a developmental delay in, in social emotional learning especially, and, and some of these youngest grades were talking about, you know, getting kids to the level where they, they could go in and learn, uh, just because they weren’t there yet, they were having to work on, simple things like even how to have a, a two-way conversation, how to resolve conflict, how to express, uh, an opinion in a respectful way, and these kids just didn’t seem to have that. Not that they didn’t get there, it just took a lot of work, you know, frontloading these classes for the first, you know, weeks or, or, you know, month or so to get these kids comfortable, uh, to get the anxieties level down where they could actually sit and, and, and learn and have basically a, a community within the classroom.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What do the teachers do in cases like that? Obviously, you know, you want to start the curriculum, but every child is at a different level and, and how do you address that kind of basic stuff and what does it do to a class when you’ve gotta take that time?

Mike Lloyd Well, it can be disruptive. I mean, Sonya mentioned some of the disruptive behaviours that have gone on. That’s certainly on the increase, but most of these kids, it may not be, you know, as an extreme, it’s just, uh, just that delay, right? So there, there is a real focus on the social emotional curriculum before they, they hit the actual curriculum. So it, it’s, you know, just slowing down, making sure the kids have a connection with each other, a connection with the teacher and learn, basically just get a little more help, I guess. I mean, with the, uh, with the, these basic, basic socials. What would a teacher typically do in this situation and what can they do to help these kids? And that’s where we’ll get into the talk of resources, I guess. I mean, in some of the more extreme cases or kids who have more special needs, I mean, certainly, uh, there is a cry for, for more resources for them. For educational aids and, and more counselling and that kind of thing. Because the counselling right now, is very much overwhelmed. I mean, the teachers do their best, uh, again, they’ve, they’ve got the skills for, for the social emotional learning, but sometimes they’re needing to call in a counsellor. But there are so many kids who are having this kind of problem. That’s these counselors who, you know, in, in one of the districts, uh, I spoke with, there’s typically one counselor covering two elementary schools. So they’re there for two and a half days a week, and they’ve got four or 500 students at each school. So there, there’s very little time to be spent individually. So they’re having to adapt, these counsellors are taking a, a whole class approach rather than an individual approach with some of the social emotional learning and just sort of trying to address it together. And, and of course a lot of these schools also rely on, sort of the outside community for help as well. They take a, uh, what they call a wraparound approach. So they support in school the best they can with the kids and the parents, but they also rely on, uh, within the community counselling or, or other services with paediatricians and the like. But right now, all of those services are overloaded as well. There were wait lists. It can take months to get in. So that wraparound approach just isn’t working right now. So some of the other experts we’ve spoken with talk about, basically say it’s a mental health crisis almost in the making. We’ve got all these children and families who need the help. Uh, it’s just very tough to get right now.

Sonya Aslam If I can just jump off of Mike’s point really quickly, one of the things about the wraparound effect is the parents I spoke to, you know, because there’s such a lack of help and resources on the front lines in classrooms, within the education system, they are being forced to spend thousands, in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars of their own money to go on the outside and get help for their kids. The current wait time to get a psycho-educational assessment here right now, in some cases is three years. For some parents, so I, you know, I spoke to one mother whose daughter is in grade two. She’s currently on medication for ADHD. She’s having a number of struggles readjusting to being in a classroom after spending her entire, you know, educational career in a pandemic and only really being around adults who wear masks, who you don’t know because you’ve been isolated for so long and she’s spent thousands of dollars of her own money to get her the help she needs. That’s really hard because for a lot of families, they don’t have the money to do this, but you don’t know what else to do. These kids need counselling. They need psychological help. In some cases, they need medication, they need extra tutoring, they need a number of things, and when the resources are lacking on the front lines, parents sort of have their backs up against the wall to say, what am I supposed to do now? And it’s heartbreaking.

Sonya Aslam Before we get to what officials should be doing about this and what they can do, Mike, you spoke to one of the counselors who works in schools. Can you give us a sense, I know we’ve talked about, you know, they’re overburdened. Give us a sense of their workload and, and what they’re being asked to do and what like a day looks like for ’em.

Mike Lloyd Well, it’s a lot of anxiety. Many of these kids are coming in just anxious and a lot of it is separation anxiety because, um, maybe they did spend those, those early years, you know, cloistered at home so much. A lot of it is, you know, they’ll bring the kids in early if they can with some of the, uh, the more tough cases. Work with the teachers maybe to get them to bring a student in before class, give them some jobs to do before class starts, maybe cleaning the whiteboards or, or tidying something up or organizing something. And they really work to try to get that connection with the teacher. And there’s a lot of classwork and small group work, as I mentioned. And it is basically sort of going from, from group to group and school to school and, and their caseloads are, are very full at this point.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And you guys went all the way to the top, so to speak, to try to figure out what could be done and what’s coming. And, and Sonya, you spoke to Dr. Bonnie Henry, the Chief Medical Officer of Health, uh, for B.C. and I gather you also heard from the premier about this. What kinds of things are they saying about the stories that you’re telling them you’re hearing?

Sonya Aslam Well, it’s odd. They’re both saying two very different things and I think that’s concerning coming from the top. So Premier David Eby admitted yes, there are issues currently in school. He called it a loss of learning from what we saw during the days of the pandemic to where we are right now, now that kids are back in class full-time. And he said that the Ministry of Education is tracking how students are doing and they’re working to try and get more in place. The BC budget came down in February and the B.C. government said, yes, we’re going to invest, you know, more than $3 billion, billion with a B in education, and they’re putting more than 160 million towards getting, you know, teacher psychologists extra resources on the front lines. That’s his take. Dr. Bonnie Henry said, no kids are adjusting just fine. And she’s not sure who we talked to was her response when I said, well, where do you think this is coming from? We’re hearing from counselors and parents and teachers and a district principal, we’re hearing from the top doctor at a local health authority who’s seeing it firsthand and the increased calls for mental health for youth.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So where do you think this is coming from? And she just said, everything she’s hearing says that kids are adjusting fine. That’s really confusing and especially people outside of British Columbia who know Dr. Henry for her empathy throughout the pandemic and for her, her sense of community, uh, in reaching out and caring for people that, listen, I’m editorializing a bit here. That doesn’t seem to, to make sense from that perspective.

Sonya Aslam No, and I think we aired that story on Monday and it is doing really well. She was trending on Twitter. Like she was trending on Twitter because her comments have really taken a lot of people back. It’s really strange when a lot of people say, look, I’m having issues with the school system. I’m having education issues with the system, yada, yada, yada. And you have the top doctor come out and say, no, it’s fine. Yeah, your kids are fine. Don’t worry about it. Yeah, your kids are fine. So she’s saying, I understand that the last three years have been difficult and she sympathizes with that. Everyone’s had a lot of uncertainty. Everyone’s had a really tough three years. Things have been challenging. She doesn’t deny that, but what she’s not quite getting on board with is all of these people we’ve spoken to saying there’s an issue in the classroom and it is not being addressed. And it’s really weird when the Premier says, I’m aware of the issues, we’re working on it. And the top doctor says, no, everything’s fine.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So what kind of solutions are out there? And you mentioned more money is coming from the province in terms of investment in those resources, but are there other approaches? That schools or teachers or uh, you know, counsellors of the like could be taking that might kind of acknowledge what these kids are going through and offer a more holistic look.

Sonya Aslam Honestly. Uh, it’s funny, we talked about this in a couple of meetings and I know there was a big push to be like, what’s the solution? We don’t have a solution. Unfortunately, the, the same thing that everyone we talked to said was money and resources, because they do go hand in hand if we don’t have the people on the front lines in classrooms helping the kids who need it most, the kids who are the most vulnerable. Then what are we doing? And at the end of the day, I think something that is not being seen as clearly as it should be is that these kids are losing out on their education. They’re not getting the experience that they deserve day after day because you don’t have the help that’s required to get them through. Day to day, and that’s really hard. But money and resources, again, they go hand in hand. I know I sound like a broken record saying it, but that’s everyone we heard from was like, if I don’t have people to help my son, what am I doing? I can’t do it. I’m not with him in school all day and he’s struggling. So now what? Everyone is sort of going, okay, but now what we’ve, we’ve established the problem. But what’s the solution? And you’re correct. That is the next step. And the only answers we were getting from everyone we spoke to was money and people. We need the people who are experts in this field to do this, to help these kids. These kids are going to struggle not only today, but if we don’t set them up for tomorrow, they will fail in the end.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So last question for both you guys then, and I’ll, I’ll pose the same thing that you just asked, which is now what the investigative series is over, as you say, it’s generated, uh, quite a stir out there. What happens now? What are you guys gonna be looking for and, and how do you follow it up and stay on this with reporting?

Sonya Aslam I, you know, it’s funny, I don’t think the investigation is over. I think that we’ve scratched the surface and I think that we’ll continue to get follow up stories out of this, even if it just includes hearing from more people within the education system. I don’t think this is over. I think that until we actually see, uh, numbers get to where they need to be, you know, in the education system. Nothing’s gonna change. I spoke to the B C T F, the BC Teachers Federation, and they see the same things that we’ve outlined. Teachers are overwhelmed. They’re frustrated. Parents are frustrated, children are frustrated. And you know, one of the numbers I heard sort of being thrown around is there’s hundreds and hundreds of openings within the education system in this province that need to be filled to get things up to a normal level. And we’re not even close. Really, for me, the biggest thing is, is the reaction, we, I mean, you said it, there has been so much reaction. We have received dozens and dozens of emails, not just from teachers, but those dealing with kids in other ways to, um, scout leaders, coaches, group leaders, community leaders, and they just wanna share their story. They’re, it, it’s like we’ve struck a chord and suddenly someone is hearing them and they just wanna share because they feel like they, this is an issue that they’ve been struggling with, and they feel like they’re not being heard.

Jordan Heath Rawlings I guess we’ll have to keep watching and you guys can keep digging. Sonya, Mike, thank you so much for this. Thanks for the work you did on this investigation.

Sonya Aslam Thank you.

Mike Lloyd Thanks and, uh, thanks for having us. with, and they feel like they’re not being heard.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Sonya Aslam and Mike Lloyd with City News 1130 in Vancouver. That was the big story. For more, you can head to the big story podcast.ca. Talk to us anytime via Twitter at the Big story Fpn or with email hello at the big story podcast.ca. You can also call and leave a voicemail. If you’d like to tell us your story about what you are seeing in school-aged children, please feel free to do so. We will definitely pass it on to the reporters. You can listen to The Big Story wherever you get podcasts. And you can rate it and review it if you would be so kind. You can also get it on a smart speaker just by asking it to play the Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.