Why I'm pulling my daughter from the physical classroom as mother first, physician second

Dr. Nili Kaplan-MyrthI lay awake for several nights last week, worrying about whether I should pull my child out of school.I'm a family doctor in Ottawa. Pulling my child from her classroom wasn’t a decision that I made based on the number of children with COVID-19, or children admitted to hospital, or a review of epidemiological literature on best practices to reduce viral transmission in schools. It was a decision I made as a parent and a partner.Even though I trained as an anthropologist before medicine–an area of study all about critical analysis of our healthcare system and institutions–prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I never thought about how health politics would play out in our children’s classrooms. Then the school year ended abruptly, in March 2020, and everyone had to struggle with the transition to online learning. At the time, I took to social media and started advocating for community supports. Like many others, I asserted, “I will not get my hair cut, or go to a bar or gym, until it is safe for our children to be in school.”I was vocal about the systemic inequalities the pandemic continues to highlight. We saw privileged people form private “pods” for learning. Many who had the option decided to keep their children in a virtual classroom. Meanwhile essential workers and those in precarious employment or financial instability didn't have the luxury of the choice to keep their children home. We gasped at the blatant gender imbalance represented by the disproportionate number of mothers forced to leave workforce.Those of us who registered kids for in-class learning in September 2020, did so with the blind faith that public health wouldn’t allow it if it weren’t safe. I spent hours counselling my patients who have children with learning disabilities and ADHD, who needed school as respite from their children. I worried about the well-being of some of my patients who needed school as respite from home. Over 12 months, I put teachers on stress leave, parents on stress leave, kids on stress leave.My child is in middle school. Although she is an independent learner, she asked to go to school. I needed to return to working from my office, so it made sense for her to go to school. Within the first few weeks of September, our daughter’s class was sent home because one of the students tested positive for COVID-19. I cancelled appointments with my own patients and we all got tested and isolated for 14 days. As a doctor, I saw the rise in rates of COVID-19 in December and told our daughter that she wouldn't be able to return to school for the first weeks of January. She was upset with me, but then the province of Ontario announced school closures and that exculpated me from having to be the mother who wouldn’t let her child go to school.After witnessing the stress and disruption of school closures in January, public health officials asserted that schools shouldn't have closed. The caveat, however, was that everything else should have closed first (then, only as a last resort, would schools close). It's not hard to imagine my frustration as our province threw open the doors to shopping malls and indoor dining, despite a rising number of schools with active cases of COVID-19, and a teacher in a coma in Toronto, who has since died. Here we are, now, in April, and the third wave of COVID is a tsunami with these variants of concern. There's a disconnect between the public health missives we receive—telling us isolate an entire household if anyone has any symptoms—and the lack of political will to support families—our province dismissed the idea of paid sick leave. How do we make sense of it? How can parents believe that classrooms are “safe,” when the same politicians are telling us teachers hanging out in staff rooms is partly to blame for COVID-19's continued spread. The improvements to ventilation that were promised never really came to fruition. Class sizes in schools have never dropped as low as we were told they should. As a parent, I watch all the middle-school students crowd together as they enter their school each morning. So I thought about my husband, who has a reactive airway. I thought about my daughter’s teachers. I thought about what I was willing to risk. As cases doubled and tripled in Ottawa, I prepared my daughter, told her I'd pull her out of school. It isn’t what should happen. It isn’t equitable. It's a privilege to be able to make that choice for my child, while others have no options before them. It isn’t right that teachers can't make that choice for themselves, for their own safety. And it isn’t clear to me that I can trust the “system” to ensure anyone’s safety.There have been two cases of COVID in our daughter’s school in the last two weeks. No doubt teachers are holding their breath until the April break, torn by the desire to see their students in person and the fear that they’ll get sick before they get the vaccine. My daughter is upset she can't see her friends, that she's missing spirit week at school. The system is broken. If we had universal paid sick days, nobody would have to lay awake at night worrying about whether they can afford to stay home (or keep their kids home) while sick. If we had smaller classrooms with better ventilation, and educators and childcare providers were immunized, we wouldn’t worry quite so much. If we truly had all-hands-on-deck with primary care, I'd be heading out as a family doctor to immunize all the educators in the three schools within walking distance of my office. I’m certain I’m not alone in feeling burned out by the uncertainty about whether our health and education systems are led by solid policy or by rotten politics. I don’t have the answer to that, as a family doctor. But I know, as a mother, that I’m not willing to gamble with my family’s health.Dr Nili Kaplan-Myrth, MD, CCFP, PhD, is a family doctor and anthropologist who writes about health policy and politics and co-hosts a podcast, RxAdvocacy.

Why I'm pulling my daughter from the physical classroom as mother first, physician second

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