High absenteeism rates of support staff worry parents of disabled students

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Jennifer kept getting frantic text messages from her teenaged daughter, who is disabled and uses a wheelchair, about the lack of support workers at her public high school.

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“I’m really frustrated with the school board right now,” said Jennifer, who didn’t want to use her real name. “They say everything is fine and this is not the case.”

Jennifer’s daughter is not in a separate, special education classroom. She’s integrated with the general school population but has educational support workers who help get books out of her backpack, get her lunch, help her with her coat, take her to the washroom and help her on and off the bus.

Jennifer said twice last week, she received a morning phone call from the school alerting her that multiple educational support workers were away that day. She was told the one temporary replacement worker was male so someone else would be asked to help her daughter with toileting and that the vice principal would also be helping out during the day.

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“My daughter is texting me saying nobody has shown up. The VP was still in a meeting. When you have a physical disability and you’re trapped, if no one is coming to get you, it’s the most terrifying feeling in the world,” Jennifer said. “She has anxiety about it.”

Jennifer said when the principal or vice principal calls in the morning to “give you a head’s up” about staffing “they won’t say keep her home but when they’re calling, that’s what they want you to do.”

The union representing the 900 support workers employed by the Greater Essex County District School Board has been sounding the alarm about shortages among educational assistants, child and youth workers, developmental service workers and early childhood educators since September.

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“We are in crisis right now,” said Tyler Campbell, the educational support staff bargaining unit president for the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation. “There are 60 to 80 unfilled jobs a day. Our educational support staff are breaking the collective agreement left right and center to help out. We’re just surviving at this point. It’s just, let’s keep the kids happy in schools. It’s giving them an iPad, there’s no learning going on.”

Support staff shortages are not limited to the public board, according to Mike Wilcox, the superintendent who oversees special education for the board.

“There are shortages of educational support staff across the province,” Wilcox said. “This isn’t unique to Windsor, it’s an issue for many boards across Ontario.”

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The problem, he said, has been exacerbated by “increasingly higher rates of absenteeism” due to COVID-19 isolation protocols or illness, coupled with a robust number of pandemic-influenced retirements and resignations.

Despite all of those factors, Wilcox said “we feel we have the appropriate amount of staff to support the students. It’s the higher rates of absenteeism that have been more of a real struggle for us but we have contingency plans in place.”

What’s happening in Windsor is a “situation that’s happening everywhere,” according to Jeff Preston, a disabilities advocate and assistant professor at London’s Western University. “What COVID has actually revealed to us is the real dire straits that public services have been in for quite some time. I think (Jennifer’s) story is a perfect example of what happens when stress is placed on one part of the system and it filters down to the rest of the system.”

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Preston is all too familiar with the “just stay home” philosophy for the disabled.

“I’ve been told to stay home for 38 years,” said Preston who was born with a rare neuromuscular myopathy and also uses a wheelchair. “People with disabilities have traditionally been at the back of the line.”

Provincewide shortages of support staff are the result of “systemic problems in how we fund these things or rather, lack there of,” Preston said. “We’re not encouraging people into this line of work. How do we make this a safe, enjoyable, functioning world for EAs? It probably needs more resources, it probably needs more training and it probably needs re-imagining our system.”

Wilcox said the board has been holding interviews and orientations for educational support staff every two weeks since before the school year started.
“We continue to recruit all the time,” he said.

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Campbell noted low wages for a challenging job making it difficult to recruit and retain full-time and temporary supply workers.

“There is a way out,” Campbell said. “It will take the government and the collective bargaining table. We say we have a world-class education system but the employees who work with our most vulnerable don’t get compensated for their work.”

Preston encouraged parents to advocate at all levels of government, right up to the premier’s office “to acknowledge that certain people have not been front and center of the government’s agenda for quite some time.”

For Jennifer, she encourages parents to call their school each morning to see if their child’s EA is there, or if there’s a replacement worker and if not, what the plan is to support their child.

“I need parents to know what’s happening,” Jennifer said. “Especially if they are sending non-verbal children to school thinking their needs are being met.”

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