TAKING CARE OF OURSELVES THE WAY WE TAKE CARE OF OTHERS
BY ELIZABETH MITCHELL I
f you had asked any educator in On- tario in February of 2020, “How are you doing?” you would have heard about stress, long hours and struggles with work-life balance. In a profes- sion that already places great de-
mands on the people charged with educating the next generation, ETFO was in the midst of the biggest labour action and threat to public education in a generation. Then the worries about a far-away virus
turned into a real and imminent danger. On March 12, 2020, the announcement came that Ontario’s public schools would close (for two weeks) after March Break. What followed was the first of many “pivots” between in-school and online learning, a whole new mode of teaching and learning, and the anxiety that went with the fact that the government, which had so recently been battling educators, now had their health and safety in its hands. The impact of the pandemic on learn-
ing, on the social-emotional wellness of students and on the physical safety of our school communities would have been much worse without the amazing educators who taught themselves online learning plat-
24 ETFO VOICE | FALL 2021
forms, connected with children and their families however they could, followed chal- lenging health and safety instructions and generally continued to be caring adults cre- ating a safe space for their students. Along with helping navigate the uncertainty of a pandemic, they engaged their students in supportive and challenging conversations as the news of the day revealed the preva- lence and impact of racism and colonialism in their world. But that came at the expense of the mental health of those educators. They cared for the students as they them- selves experienced these same events, and many went from stressed and overworked to clinically significant levels of anxiety and depression and reports of burnout. In October 2020, the Canadian Teachers
Federation conducted the Teacher Mental Health Check-in Survey. Fourteen thousand educators responded. Educators indicated that they were experiencing “unbearable lev- els of stress, anxiety, and a struggle to cope with the demands of teaching during the pandemic.” Seventy percent of the teachers expressed concern about their own mental health. Over 5,000 ETFO members partici- pated in another study conducted by the Oc-
cupational Health Clinics for Ontario Work- ers (OHCOW) and the Institute for Work and Health (IWH) in November/December, 2020. The results showed that educators felt the psychological health and safety climate in their workplace was not safe (46 percent gave it a negative rating, compared to 20 per- cent in a pre-pandemic survey of Canadian workers) and 57 percent of educators work- ing in schools had either moderate or severe symptoms of anxiety. While the battle with COVID-19 hasn’t
ended, as people have been vaccinated they have begun to emerge from their homes and are going out to work, to play and to school. There’s a temptation to try to forget the worst of the pandemic and return to “nor- mal,” but the fact is that educators in Ontario have been changed by this experience. And if we don’t learn from it, the next health crisis may be the mental health of educators.
YOU NEED TO FEEL SAFE TO BE SAFE
The OHCOW/IWH study showed not just that educators were experiencing clinically significant levels of anxiety, but that the anx- iety was closely correlated with their report of the presence and adequacy of infection
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