We were building the plane while flying it
Five years after COVID-19 forced Ontario schools into 27 weeks of closure across three consecutive years, a generation of students carries what researchers are calling education's long COVID — measurable deficits in literacy, mathematics, and social development, alongside rising anxiety and chronic absenteeism. The disruption did not create new vulnerabilities so much as it amplified existing ones, with children who had special needs bearing the heaviest burden. Educators and researchers now speak not of recovery but of a slow, uncertain reckoning, warning that the consequences will follow this cohort into the workforce and echo into the generation that follows.
- Students who were children when schools closed in 2020 are now testing eight to twelve months behind their peers academically, with math deficits outpacing even the significant losses in reading.
- Speech-language delays in kindergarteners have tripled in some boards, mental health referrals have surged, and chronic absenteeism has become a stubborn fixture in classrooms still trying to find their footing.
- Teachers and administrators were asked to build the plane while flying it — pivoting overnight to emergency remote learning with no training, no template, and no certainty that any of it was working.
- School boards are now embedding social workers, tutoring programs, and mental health supports at every grade level, but experts caution these measures are repairs to a foundation that was cracked, not replaced.
- Researchers warn the pandemic generation — already described as a canary in the coal mine for broader societal pressures — will carry these scars into the workforce, with ripple effects extending to the next generation of learners.
The week before March break 2020, Emily Caruso-Parnell was posting respiratory hygiene signs in a Sudbury elementary school when the first local COVID-19 case was announced and parents began pulling their children from classrooms. What was meant to be a two-week extension became something no one had language for yet. Ontario schools would remain closed for a minimum of 27 weeks across three consecutive school years, and the students who left that March would not simply return to where they had been.
Caruso-Parnell, now a professor at Laurentian University, spent the 2020–2021 school year leading remote learning for the Rainbow District School Board — work she describes as producing a three-hour children's television show every day. Even that structured effort, she acknowledges, could not substitute for what was lost. Teachers were sent home with no training and told to figure it out. The pandemic, she reflects, did not invent the problems that followed; it turned up the volume on every difficulty that already existed.
Natasha Folino, superintendent at the Sudbury Catholic District School Board, watched similar patterns emerge in her schools. Kindergarteners arrived with striking gaps in socialization. Speech-language delays tripled. Attendance fell and stayed low. Her board responded by adding social workers and child and youth workers and embedding mental health programming across every grade — responses to damage that had already been done.
Ontario's standardized test results show modest recent gains, but education researcher Paul Bennett is unsparing in his assessment. Students are not where they should be. The pivot to remote learning was, in his view, fumbled — a chaotic mixture of Zoom sessions and take-home packets that compounded the original disruption rather than containing it. He calls the pandemic the greatest disaster to strike education in his lifetime.
What concerns Bennett most is the long arc. This generation, he warns, will carry its deficits into the workforce. The damage will ripple forward. School boards are working to rebuild what was fractured, but the consensus is sobering: five years on, the pandemic generation is not catching up so much as learning to live with a wound that is still, quietly, unfolding.
Five years have passed since the week before March break in 2020, when Emily Caruso-Parnell, then a vice-principal at R.L. Beattie Public School, watched her world shift in real time. She was putting up posters about respiratory hygiene, teaching children to cough into their sleeves, when the first COVID-19 case was announced in Sudbury. Parents began collecting their kids. The province extended March break by two weeks. "It was a big unknown, and nobody knew what was going to happen, and we just never came back," Caruso-Parnell recalls. Her students would not see their classrooms again that year. Across Ontario, schools remained shuttered for a minimum of 27 weeks—135 days—disrupting three consecutive school years and forcing a wholesale pivot to emergency remote learning that no educator had trained for.
Five years later, the damage is measurable and persistent. A generation of students now carries what researchers call education's long COVID: learning deficits of eight to twelve months in both academic and social development, rising anxiety, chronic absenteeism, and mental health deterioration that shows no sign of reversing on its own. The pandemic generation—children who were eight to twelve years old when schools closed—are underperforming every other cohort their age. They are showing signs of what Paul Bennett, a professor of education at St. Mary's University in Halifax and author of a major 2023 paper on pandemic fallout, describes as post-pandemic collapse: anxieties, fears, cellphone addiction, an inability to rise to challenges, and a pervasive sense of underperformance. Children with special needs suffered most acutely.
Caruso-Parnell, now an assistant professor in Laurentian University's school of education, was tasked with leading remote learning efforts for the Rainbow District School Board during the 2020-2021 school year. She describes the work as "producing a three-hour children's television show every day." But even that structured approach paled beside the chaos of emergency online learning, where teachers and students were simply told to go home and figure it out. "We were building the plane while flying it," she says. "No one had ever taught in this way before. So nobody knows what exactly the right things are, even if there is a right thing. Is there a right way to teach four-year-olds online? You know, there's the best you can do, and that's the best you can do." The pandemic, she observes, did not create new problems—it amplified existing ones. Mental health concerns, school violence, learning loss: all were dialed up by the disruption.
Natasha Folino, now superintendent of education at the Sudbury Catholic District School Board, was principal of St. Francis Catholic Elementary School when the closures began. She remembers the minute-by-minute scramble, the unknowns that seemed to multiply daily. But she also saw something else: school staff rallying, thinking outside conventional boundaries, working to keep students connected and safe. Still, the impacts have been undeniable. Her board has documented mental health issues, lowered attendance, and a striking lack of socialization in students entering kindergarten. Speech and language needs have surged—the Conseil scolaire catholique Nouvelon reported that identifications of speech-language delays in kindergarten students have tripled since the pandemic. The board has responded by adding social workers and child and youth workers, embedding mental health programming at every grade level, and introducing tutoring programs.
EQAO assessment results—Ontario's standardized testing—show incremental gains in recent years, but the picture remains troubling. Reading remains an area of need, though Grade 10 literacy performance has improved. Mathematics deficits are more pronounced than reading losses. Bennett, examining these results, is blunt: students are not where they should be. He calls the pandemic "the greatest disaster affecting education in my lifetime." The transition to remote learning was, in his assessment, fumbled and bungled—a mixture of Zoom sessions, take-home packets, and institutional chaos that compounded the original disruption. The learning loss is real, widespread, and persistent, affecting students from elementary through high school.
What troubles Bennett most is not just the academic gap but what it signals about the future. These students, he warns, will carry the scars into the workplace. The impacts will ripple into the next generation of education. "I think they're going to continue to struggle," he says. "They've got the challenges of the contemporary world in the most acute form. They're the canary in the coal mine, or the worst example of what can happen when a generation is kind of failed by a school system." School boards are implementing targeted programming in reading and math, expanding mental health services, and working to rebuild relationships fractured by years of disruption. But the consensus among educators and researchers is clear: the pandemic generation will not simply catch up. The damage, five years on, is still unfolding.
Notable Quotes
Education's long COVID lingers on in the form of measurable learning loss, stunted social development, and mental-health side effects.— Paul Bennett, professor of education at St. Mary's University
We were building the plane while flying it. No one had ever taught in this way before.— Emily Caruso-Parnell, assistant professor at Laurentian University's school of education
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
When you say learning loss persists, what does that actually look like in a classroom five years later?
It's not just that a kid is behind in math. It's that they never developed the foundational habits—how to sit with a problem, how to ask for help, how to trust that struggle leads somewhere. Some of these students were in kindergarten or first grade when everything went remote. They learned to learn alone, in front of a screen, without the social scaffolding that normally holds a young learner up.
And the mental health piece—is that separate from the learning loss, or are they tangled together?
They're inseparable. A student who is anxious, who is chronically absent, who is addicted to their phone as a coping mechanism—that student cannot access learning. The boards understand this now. That's why they're hiring more mental health workers. But you can't hire your way out of five years of disruption in two or three years of recovery.
The speech-language delays tripling in kindergarten—that's striking. Why would school closures affect how kids learn to talk?
Because language development happens through interaction. A four-year-old learns to speak by being around other four-year-olds, by playing, by being corrected gently, by hearing language used in context. Remote learning can't replicate that. Some of these kids spent their entire early childhood in isolation or in front of screens. They missed the window.
Bennett says this will be passed on to the next generation. What does he mean by that?
These students will become parents, workers, citizens carrying unresolved trauma and learning gaps. If they struggle with reading, their own children may struggle. If they didn't develop social resilience, they'll parent differently. The pandemic generation isn't just behind—they're the first cohort to experience something this systemic, this sudden. We're still learning what that means.
Is there any evidence that the recovery programs are actually working?
Some. EQAO scores are trending upward. But incremental gains over time isn't the same as catching up. And we're only five years out. The real test will be whether these students can compete academically and socially with peers who weren't disrupted. That's still an open question.