Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update
United for a Barrier-Free Society for All People with Disabilities
Web: www.aodaalliance.org Email: aodafeedback@gmail.com Twitter: @aodaalliance Facebook: www.facebook.com/aodaalliance/
Send Us Your Feedback Very Quickly on Our Draft Brief to the Ontario Government on the Urgent Needs of K-12 Students with Disabilities During the COVID-19 Crisis
June 11, 2020
SUMMARY
We are rushing to prepare and submit a brief to the Ford Government on what it must do now and as schools eventually re-open to meet the urgent needs of students with disabilities during the COVID-19 crisis. We have assembled a draft brief, which we set out below. We want your feedback and ideas. We need them fast. We want to get this brief submitted to the Government as quickly as we can. We are sorry this is so rushed. Life during COVID-19 feels like an endless blitz for the AODA Alliance!
Send your feedback to us by June 16, 2020 by emailing us at aodafeedback@gmail.com and feel free to share this draft brief with others. We welcome feedback from anyone who wants to offer it to us.
Stay safe!
MORE DETAILS
A Brief to the Ontario Government on Key Measures Needed to Address the Urgent Learning Needs of Students with Disabilities in Ontario During the COVID-19 Crisis During Distance Learning and in the Eventual Re-Opening of Schools
June 11, 2020
NOTE: This is only a draft. The AODA Alliance seeks input and additional ideas no later than June 16, 2020. Send feedback to aodafeedback@gmail.com
1. Pressing Need for A Comprehensive Ministry of Education Plan of Action to Address Urgent Needs of Students with Disabilities During the COVID-19 Crisis
Since the COVID-19 crisis began, the AODA Alliance has been urging the Ontario Government to develop and announce a comprehensive plan to meet the urgent need of students with disabilities during the COVID-19 crisis. This has been needed so over 70 school boards don’t have to each re-invent the wheel in deciding what the needs of students with disabilities are and how best to meet them. To date, the Ontario Government has not done what we have urged.
The need for this provincial plan remains pressing during the period of distance learning due to school closures. It is also needed to ensure that students with disabilities’ urgent needs are met across Ontario when schools eventually re-open. Ontario needs to also be prepared in case of the realistic possibility that distance learning will have to continue in the fall, either because school re-opening is further delayed, or because a second wave of COVID-19 would require another round of school closures.
To date, the Ontario Government has primarily if not totally focused its education strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic on students without disabilities. Almost as an afterthought, it then reminded school boards that they should also accommodate students with special education needs.
We therefore recommend that:
#1. The Ministry of Education should immediately develop, announce and implement a comprehensive plan for meeting the urgent learning needs of students with disabilities during the COVID-19 crisis. This plan should include during this time of distance learning, during an eventual return to school, and in case of a future COVID-19 wave that requires another round of school closures.
2. Need for a Provincial “Students with Disabilities Command Table”
To deal with the need for rapid planning during the COVID-19 crisis, the Ontario Government has commendably set up its own “command tables” to deal with critical areas, like health care planning and planning for the safe operation of the economy during this crisis. This enables the Government to have critical expertise at the table that makes key decisions.
There is a pressing need for a “students with disabilities command table” within the Government to plan for the urgent learning needs of students with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. No such table or concentrated expertise centre exists now within Ontario’s Ministry of Education. We have been pressing for this for three months without success. That table needs to be staffed by professionals with focused expertise on providing education to students with disabilities.
This is not meant to be an advisory or consultative table. It needs to be a planning and implementation table that can quickly make decisions and effectively connect with the front lines in the education system, where the action is.
This need is not fulfilled by the Minister of Education having had some consultative meetings with the Minister’s Advisory Committee on Special Education (MACSE), which still has vacancies, or with the AODA K-12 Education Standards Development Committee. Those bodies are only advisory. They do not have the capacity of a Ministry command table. Of course, their input should be welcomed and valued.
We therefore recommend that:
#2. The Ministry of Education should immediately establish a “Students with Disabilities Education Command Table” to oversee the development and implementation of a Government action plan for meeting the urgent learning needs of students with disabilities during the COVID-19 crisis, and to swiftly react to issues for students with disabilities as they arise.
3. Preventing a Rash of Refusals to Admit Students with Disabilities to School When Schools Re-Open
Ontario’s Education Act lets a school principal refuse to admit to school any “person whose presence in the school or classroom would in the principal’s judgment be detrimental to the physical or mental well-being of the pupils…”. Disability advocates have repeatedly criticized this as an excessive, arbitrary and unfair power. The Education Act and the Ministry of Education leave to school boards and individual principals an extremely wide discretion over when, how and why to exclude a student from school under this power. The Education Act does not even require principals to give a parent their reasons for excluding a student from school, nor does it cap the duration of the student’s exclusion from school.
Disproportionately, this excessive power has been used against some students with disabilities. School boards have not always tracked when or why or how many students are excluded from school under this power. Long before this COVID-19 crisis, parent advocates have called for this power to be reduced and regulated. See for example the January 30, 2019 joint news release by the AODA Alliance and the Ontario Autism Coalition. To date, the Ontario Government has not agreed to any significant reform of this excessive power.
In September 2018, the Ontario Human Rights Commission released a new policy on accessible education for students with disabilities. Its recommendations to the Ontario Government included, among other things:
“9. Identify and end the practice of exclusion wherein principals ask parents to keep primary and secondary students with disabilities home from school for part or all of the school day (and the role that an improper use of section 265(1)(m) of the Education Act may be playing in this practice).”
There is a serious risk that some principals will feel at liberty to use this power to exclude some students with disabilities from school during school re-openings in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially before any effective vaccine is invented and widely available. This is especially so if school boards do not effectively plan for the inclusion and accommodation of students with disabilities at school during this school re-opening process. They may do so either because they don’t know how to accommodate some students with disabilities during social distancing, or because the Ontario Government and/or their school board has not given them the directions and resources they need to be able to effectively include and accommodate those students.
The need to reform practices regarding a school principal’s power to refuse to admit a student to school has become even more pressing in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is essential that school re-openings this fall do not lead to the creation of two classes of students, those allowed to return to school and those who are excluded from school, especially if this disproportionately divides along disability lines. A principal can feel a real temptation to use the power to refuse to admit such students to school during a COVID-19 school re-opening because it would seem to solve the problem of having to plan for those students’ needs at school.
The Ontario Government has been willing to give directions to a school board about the use of its power to refuse to admit students to school in other contexts. It can do so here as well. The Ontario Ministry of Education has very recently given directions to the Peel District School Board to keep and report data on exclusions of students from school by race. In directive number 9, the Ministry stipulates that:
“The Board shall centrally track disaggregated race-based data on suspensions (in-school and out-of-school), expulsions and exclusions, and report publicly through the Annual Equity Accountability Report Card.”
We therefore recommend that:
#3. The Ministry of Education should immediately issue a policy direction to all school boards, imposing restrictions on when and how a principal may exclude a student from school. including directions that:
- a) During the re-opening at schools, students with disabilities have an equal right to attend schools as do students without disabilities. The power to refuse to admit a student to school should not be used in a way that disproportionately burdens students with disabilities or that creates a barrier to their right to attend school.
- b) A principal who refuses to admit a student to school during the school re-opening process should be required to immediately give the student and their family written notice of their decision to do so, including written reasons for the refusal to admit, the duration of the refusal to admit and notice of the family’s right to appeal this refusal to admit to the school board.
- c) A principal who refuses to admit a student to school for all or part of the school day should be required to report this in writing to their school board’s senior management, including the reasons for the exclusion, its duration and whether the student has a disability. Each school board should be required to compile this information and to report it on a bi-monthly basis to the board of trustees, the public and the Ministry of Education (with individual information totally anonymized). The Ministry should promptly make public on a school board by school board basis the information it receives on numbers, reasons and durations of refusals to admit during post- COVID-19 school re-opening.
4. Need for Specific COVID-19 Individual Education Plans for Individual Students with Disabilities Before and During Transitioning to Return to School
For students with disabilities the distance learning during COVID-19 will have created different deficits and challenges. The transition back to school will present challenges that will vary from student to student.
Students’ IEPs were all written while students were in school, with no contemplation of the COVID-19 crisis or the challenges and hardships of distance learning and then of transition back to school. All students with disabilities will need their IEP modified to address these unforeseen needs.
They each need a COVID-19 –specific IEP. This should be done now and over the summer, not in the fall when students are hopefully already back in school. This will require action now. It may require new resources to enable this to be worked on over the summer.
As noted earlier, there is a real possibility that distance learning will continue in the fall or may have to resume due to a second wave of COVID-19. IEPs need to now anticipate and address these needs.
We therefore recommend that:
#4. For each student with disabilities, each school board should now:
- a) Contact the family of each student with disabilities, preferably by phone rather than email, to discuss and identify the student’s progress during the shutdown, the student’s specific and individualized disability-related deficits and needs arising from and during distance learning due to the COVID-19crisis and the student’s needs and challenges related to eventual return to school (including any vulnerabilities of other family members due to the COVID-19 pandemic), and;
- b) add to their IEP specific goals and activities to effectively address their disability-related needs during distance learning, and in connection with transition back to school.
5. Need for Provincial and School Board Rapid Response Teams to Address Recurring Urgent Needs of Students with Disabilities
During the COVID-19 crisis, Ontario’s education system continues to try to navigate uncharted territory. No matter how much planning for the needs of students with disabilities takes place as we here recommend, unexpected surprises will crop up. school boards and the Ministry of Education each need to be able to quickly detect these, and to nimbly respond to them.
Parents, teachers and principals need a central point in the school board to report difficult challenges. Each school board needs to feed this information to a single point at the Ministry that is staying on top of things, for rapid responses to recurring issues around the province.
We therefore recommend that:
#5. The Ministry of Education should assign staff to assist its Students with Disabilities Command Table by serving as a central rapid response team to receive feedback from school boards on recurring issues facing students with disabilities and to help find solutions to be shared with school boards.
#6. The Ministry should direct that each school board shall establish a similar central rapid response team within the board to receive feedback from teachers and principals about problems they are encountering serving students with disabilities during the COVID-19 period, that can quickly network with other similar offices at other school boards, and that can report recurring issues to the Ministry.
6. Surge Needed in Specialized Supports for Students with Disabilities
All students will have fallen behind to some extent during the months when schools were closed. This hardship falls especially on students with disabilities who have additional specialized curriculum to learn, related to their disabilities, or who need specialized supports to learn which are unavailable during distance learning.
When students return to school, students with disabilities who need those supports will need a surge in the hours of support provided to them to help them catch up and adjust to the return to school. School boards cannot simply pull those resources out of the air. School boards will need added funding to hire those staff, and provincial help finding them if there are shortages.
For example, students with vision loss are unable to get the full benefit of teachers of the visually impaired (TVIs) teaching hands-on braille reading when schools are closed. School boards will need to engage additional TVIs to help ramp up the surge in TVI hours to be provided to students. There is now a shortage of TVIs in Ontario. The Ministry will need to lead the effort to provide a surge of TVIs to help school boards fill this gap during the return to school. Comparable needs can similarly be identified for students with other disabilities where such specialized educational support is needed.
We therefore recommend that:
#7. The Ministry of Education should plan for, fund and coordinate the provision by school boards of a surge in specialized disability supports to those students with disabilities who will need them when students return to school.
7. Planning for Needs of Students with Disabilities Who Cannot Themselves Ensure Social Distancing
As an illustration of the last issue discussed, any return to school while COVID-19 continues to exist in our community will require students to engage in social distancing. If schools re-open, they will be doing so mindful of the fact that many students will not be able to consistently and reliably engage in social distancing, frequent hand washing and other important protective activities. Many are too young to ensure that they can fully understand the need to do so and comply. For some older children, it may seem cool to periodically break the rules. For many, it will be impossible to remain attentive to these precautions all the time.
For any number of students with disabilities, social distancing and related safe practices may pose additional challenges. For some, wearing a mask may not be possible due to such things as sensory integration or behavioural issues.
Some students with disabilities require an education assistant (EA) or special needs assistant (SNA) for all or part of the day to fully take part in school activities. For some of these students, it will not be possible to remain two meters away while providing the support or assistance that the student needs. Some will require close assistance for eating, hand-washing and other personal needs.
Pre-COVID-19 staffing levels for EAs and SNAs did not account for these additional requirements. EAs and SNAs were not experienced with or trained for this before COVID-19. It is not sufficient to now send them an email with instructions, or a link to a training video, and thereafter to assume that they will be fully equipped to handle these duties. In addition to new in-person training, they will need to have constant access to good quality personal protective equipment (PPE), like masks.
We therefore recommend that:
#8. The Ministry of Education’s plan for school re-openings must include detailed instructions on required measures for ensuring that students with disabilities are safe from COVID-19 during any return to school. This requires additional planning in advance by school boards and additional funding to school boards to hire and train the additional SNAs and EAs they will need to ensure the safety of students with disabilities.
8. Ensuring Full Accessibility of Digital Platforms Used for Remote Classes or “Synchronous Learning”
We do not here wade into the dispute between the Ford Government and some teachers’ unions about whether or when a teacher should conduct online classes for their students in real time over the internet, sometimes called “synchronous learning”. We insist, however, that whenever an online real time class or synchronous learning takes place, or any other online meeting involving students with disabilities or their parents in connection with their education, it must be conducted via a fully accessible digital meeting platform.
When the Ontario Government moved our education system from the physical classroom to the virtual classroom in late March, it should have ensured from the start that the choice of digital classroom platforms was fully accessible. The Ontario Government did not do so, nor did it monitor school boards to see what platforms they were using. Put simply, the Ontario Government entirely dropped the ball on this critical accessibility concern to the detriment of students, teachers and parents with disabilities. It did so based on a transparently erroneous starting point. The Ministry of Education took the position that it was up to each school board to decide which online virtual meeting platform to use based on its assessment of its local needs. Yet these disability accessibility needs do not vary from school board to school board.
As a belated partial attempt to address this problem, the Minister of Education wrote school boards on or around May 26, 2020 about several issues regarding distance learning. That memo stated, among other things:
“Boards must ensure that the platforms they use for connecting with students and families are fully accessible for persons with disabilities.”
However, that direction provides no assistance to school boards on which platforms to use or avoid, or how to figure this out. It still leaves it to each school board to investigate this as much or as little as they wish, and then to duplicate the same investigations of this issue over and over across Ontario.
This issue remains a live one and will continue into the fall. It is not clear when schools will re-open. Our education system may still be running on 100% distance learning at the start of the fall school term. Even when schools re-open, there is a real likelihood that some distance learning will continue in some blended model of in-school and distance education. As noted earlier, if a second wave of COVID-19 hits, as has happened elsewhere, requiring another round of school closures, Ontario will have to return to 100% distance learning.
We therefore recommend that:
#9. The Ministry of Education should immediately engage an arms-length digital accessibility consultant to evaluate the comparative accessibility of different digital meeting platforms available for use in Ontario schools. The Ministry should immediately send the resulting report and comparison to all school boards and make it public. The Ministry should direct which platforms may be used and which may not be used for virtual or synchronous classes or parent/school meetings, based on their accessibility.
9. Ensuring Digital Accessibility of Ontario Government and TVO Online Learning Resources
Over three months into the COVID-19 crisis, the Ontario Government has still not ensured that the online content that it provides to school boards, teachers, parents and students meets accessibility requirements for computer-users with disabilities. The AODA Alliance has been raising concerns with the Government about this since early in the pandemic. We have seen no public commitment to the needed corrective action. We have raised our concerns at senior levels within TVO and the Ministry of Education. The Government and TVO were required to comply with these accessibility requirements well before the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We therefore recommend that:
#10. The Ministry of Education should immediately direct TVO to make its online learning content accessible to people with disabilities, and to promptly make public a plan of action to achieve this goal, with specific milestones and time lines.
#11. The Ministry of Education should make public a plan of action to swiftly make its own online learning content accessible for people with disabilities, setting out milestones and time lines, and should report to the public on its progress.
10. Stop Making Learning Resources Available Only in PDF Format
Throughout this pandemic, as well as beforehand, the Ministry of Education and too many school boards have continued to make important digital information available to the public, including to parents, teachers and students, only in pdf format. That format can present accessibility problems for people with disabilities. When a document is made public in PDF format, it should also be made public in an accessible format, such as MS Word. This is an important time to start this long-overdue practice.
We therefore recommend that:
#12. The Ministry of Education should direct all its staff and all school boards that whenever making digital information public in a PDF format, it must at the same time also be made available in an accessible format such as an accessible MS Word document.
11. One Size Fits All Does Not Fit for Return to School
To avoid chaos, a return to school should not be done all at once using a one-size-fits-all approach. Because we are in uncharted waters, it makes sense to go about this gradually and try different approaches at different locations to see what works. To avoid students with disabilities from being treated as after-thoughts who have to try to fit into a chaotic situation that was not designed with their needs in mind, it can be worthwhile to enable students with disabilities to return to school first, and for teaching staff to ensure their needs are met, before trying to also cope with an onslaught of all other students.
We therefore recommend that:
#13. The provincial plans for return to school should include these features:
- a) Rather than having all students across Ontario return to school at once, in a one-size-fits-all strategy, the Ontario Government should lead a strategic return to school process, trying out different approaches to see what works most effectively. For example, opening a few schools first to detect recurring problems and plan to prevent them would assist with opening of other schools across Ontario.
- b) The Ontario Government should try having the most vulnerable students, including students with disabilities, return to school first to facilitate their effective accommodation and orientation before all other students return to school.
12. Need for A Rapid Method to Spread the Word to Teachers and Parents About Effective Teaching Strategies for Students with Disabilities During COVID-19
Teachers and parents of students with disabilities are struggling around Ontario to cope with distance learning and the barriers it can create for many students with disabilities. Teachers and parents are creating novel work-arounds to address this.
Yet the Ontario Government has not been effectively canvassing the front lines of teachers and parents to gather these up and share them around the province, so all can benefit without having to re-invent the wheel I n the midst of a traumatic pandemic. We have called on the Ontario Government for the past three months to do this without success. We modelled one way of doing this by our successful May 4, 2020 online virtual town hall on teaching students with disabilities during the COVID-19 crisis (jointly organized with the Ontario Autism Coalition). As far as we have been able to learn, the Ontario Government has neither taken up that idea nor has it shared with school boards the link to our May 4, 2020 virtual town hall so that they can all benefit from it. We have repeatedly asked the Ministry of Education to share that link with school boards.
In the meantime, to fill this gap, several school boards have commendably been trying to do this themselves. They have themselves been compiling good ideas and sharing them within their own board.
This is a huge and wasteful duplication of effort. The Ontario Government should be centrally accumulating and compiling all these resources, as well as researching what other jurisdictions have compiled from their own experience. These should be rapidly made available to front line teachers and parents in a way that is easy to access, not by a blizzard of endless links that few if anyone will have the time to explore.
This effort should have been done weeks ago. it is not too late, since distance learning will remain part of our lives in whole or in part until a vaccine for COVID-19 is created and widely administered.
We therefore recommend that:
#14. The Ministry of Education should immediately put in place an effective proactive team to gather teaching strategies for students with disabilities during distance learning from front line teachers, parents and school boards and make these easily available to the front lines on an ongoing basis. These should be supplemented by strategies that the Ministry researches from other jurisdictions that have innovated creative solutions.
13. Distance Learning Must Be Maintained for Students Who Cannot Return to School
There will be students who cannot return to school when others do. Their disability may make it impossible to accommodate them in school under the restrictions that apply during the COVID-19 pandemic. The school board will have a duty to accommodate them unless the school board can prove that it is impossible to do so without undue hardship. Some students may not be able to return to school because their parents or other family members with whom they live are so medically vulnerable or immune-compromised that the family must take heightened precautions to avoid the risk of contracting COVID-19.
In those cases, even if other students are learning at school, the school board must provide effective and accessible distance learning for those students who must remain at home. This may include home visits from teaching staff.
We therefore recommend that:
#15 The plans for return to school must include measures for ensuring that those who cannot return to school at the same time can secure effective distance learning, including home visits (with social distancing) from teaching staff.
14. Creating Provincial Resources for Parents to Prepare Their Students for Return to School
Some students with disabilities will need extensive preparation at home for their eventual return to school, including learning about social distancing and other new school practices due to COVID-19. Some parents will need a great deal of time to deal with this. Each school board or teacher and family should not have to duplicate these efforts by inventing their own curriculum, social stories or other resources.
We therefore recommend that:
#16. The Ministry of Education should prepare teaching materials for teachers and parents to use, addressing different disability-related learning needs, for preparing students with disabilities for the return to school, to address such changes as social distancing.
15. New Protocols Needed for Safe School Bussing
There were ample problems with bussing of students with disabilities to school before the COVID-19 crisis. In any return to school, heightened safeguards will be needed, including frequent sanitization of busses, ensuring students are seated more than 2 meters from each other and ensuring that the driver has PPE and doesn’t risk spreading COVID-19. It is not realistic to expect that this will all simply happen with private sector bussing companies who employ casual and part time drivers working at low wages.
We therefore recommend that:
#17. The Ministry of Education should create, fund and effectively enforce new standards for safe bussing practices for students with disabilities during any return to school while COVID-19 remains a community threat.