The chair of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) has publicly shared his concerns about the “extraordinary developmental needs” of incoming Kindergarten students caused by the COVID-19 pandemic – although he didn’t mention masks.
TDSB Chair Alexander Brown wrote a letter to the Ontario government on Thursday asking that early childhood educators be placed in all Kindergarten classrooms.
Currently, only Kindergarten classrooms with 15 students or more are required to have both a teacher and an early childhood educator. Brown said he would like to see that change so that all classrooms receive both.
Brown stated that junior Kindergarten students in the upcoming 2022-2023 school year “will have spent the vast majority of their existence living through the COVID-19 pandemic.”
He also said that “early childhood development depends on experience, and particularly social experience, which stimulates, tunes and hones the brain’s unfolding architecture.”
According to Brown, the pandemic has caused limited social experience opportunities “due to closed childcare services, community centres, playgrounds, social distancing and other factors.”
Brown said there is “limited existing data” on how infants and young children have been impacted by the pandemic. He did, however, cite an American study that suggested “slight neurodevelopmental delays” may be experienced by young children born during the pandemic.
The study funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) saw that infants born during the pandemic had “slightly lower scores on measures of gross motor skills, fine motor skills, and social skills.”
However, it should be noted that Brown fails to mention masks in his letter even though experts have shown that mask-wearing also interferes with young children’s brain development.
According to NPR, multiple scientific papers have shown that wearing masks makes hearing and understanding speech more difficult. The same is true for identifying facial expressions and emotions.
German psychiatrist and a cognitive neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer, who reviewed evidence on how the development of children could be impacted by wearing masks, says the negatives are clear when it comes to masking young children.
Spitzer also said that people taking care of young children should not be wearing masks. He told NPR that “(k)ids need to train up their face recognition.”
“Babies were never designed just to see the upper half of the face and to infer the lower half; even adults have a hard time doing this,” he added.
It should be noted that the TDSB previously mandated that Kindergarten students wear masks despite the Ontario government not requiring it. The TDSB was also concerned about Ontario ending its mask mandate on Mar. 21 and asked for “additional time” to remove the measures at their own pace.
According to Brown, removing “measures like masking, distancing, cohorting and daily screening protections at the same time would go against our multiple layer approach to protecting our school communities from the spread of COVID-19.”
The Ontario government denied TDSB’s request, however, with Premier Doug Ford stating that school boards “aren’t medical experts.” Ford added that “the chief medical officer (Dr. Kieran Moore) is the expert and he’s done his due diligence.”
Ontario also recently marked two years of government COVID-19 restrictions, which have included long and controversial school closures. The 2021-2022 school year is the third to be disrupted by the pandemic.
