K's Story

Our child has spent only 3 months inside a classroom since the start of the pandemic.

We have a young child. We have mixed feelings about denying our child a traditional in-person education, but we also are in positions where our jobs do not have an unlimited supply of sick days, thus frequently missing work due to illness would put our jobs at risk. We need to carefully balance the risks of going into a classroom (not only getting Covid, but then getting constantly sick after getting Covid as we see so many of our friends facing) with our ability to work and provide a living for our family.

We did manage to do 3 months in-person when vaccines were somewhat working; when we were still closer to the original strain of Covid, and before Omicron came roaring in. During this time, the classrooms were also still masking. This is when we felt the safest – that changed after Omicron strain started spreading and worsened after masking was removed. Now we are isolated again and back to online learning. This is a huge sacrifice for our child and our family – all because we do not wish to get a virus that can cause horrible damage to your body. The mental toll the experience is taking on our family is huge.

The government has not stepped in to make any improvements to schools; in fact – they did the very opposite. In our particular school, we did not see any evidence of additional air purifiers being provided or used despite hearing constant chatter about the alleged ‘improved ventilation'. Even when masking was in place, the masks provided to students were not appropriate for keeping everyone safe but that’s not applicable anymore as they’ve since removed masking requirements entirely.

This is absolute hell, and no one seems to care. There’s nothing my family can do to keep ourselves safe anymore, except remove ourselves from society as much as possible.