How Waterloo Region parents are using tutoring services to solve pandemic learning gaps in children

By: Genelle Levy, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Cambridge Times

Stephanie Richmond immediately noticed a difference between her son and daughter when it came to virtual learning. While Richmond’s daughter in Grade 3 adapted easily to the new virtual program, Richmond’s son, who is introverted, was disengaged and withdrawn in the classroom.

“My son who tends to be on the introverted side to begin with, it’s almost like the pandemic gave him permission to become even more so,” said Richmond. “He was there, but he wasn’t present, he couldn’t get what he got from a physical classroom setting.”

Richmond, who is from Cambridge, enrolled her son in the Kitchener-based tutoring service, Indigo Tutoring, and saw a huge boost in his confidence. “Instead of saying, ‘I’m stupid,’ he’s like, ‘Oh, I did that wrong. Let me go back and try it again,’ ” says Richmond.

Richmond is in the position that many parents find themselves in after a year and a half of virtual learning. Parents say that they are finding learning gaps in their kids due to some children’s inability to adapt to virtual learning.

While school boards like the Waterloo Region District School Board say they plan to combat these learning gaps with diagnostic assessments in September and tailored summer courses that review basic learning foundations, some parents are forced to pay out-of-pocket for tutoring services for children who are already two full years behind.

For Amber Huiser — whose 11-year-old son Kane has autism, a speech language disorder and a mild intellectual disability — closing the gaps was even harder. She kept getting calls from her son’s school at the beginning of the school year saying that they couldn’t manage him, despite smaller class sizes.

“There’s been so many challenges during the pandemic, the most important being the inconsistency with rules and the inability to have a normal life,” says Huiser. This poses a particular challenge for special needs children whose daily lives often revolve around rules and routines.

Huiser was forced to take Kane out of public school and enrol him in Beechwood Brainery, an alternative education school and tutoring service in Cambridge that caters to neurodiverse children. At the beginning of the school year Kane couldn’t even write. Now, thanks to the help of Beechwood Brainery, Kane is initiating writing on his own and even tackling spelling.

“This kid is literally pushed into the tiniest little box, and he tries all the time,” says Huiser. “It’s about consistently trying to retrain and figure out a new way to engage with him.”

Janet Greener, founder and principal of Beechwood Brainery, says many parents who never required tutoring services are now needing them, and that often taking it slow is the reason behind alternatives and tutoring services’ success with being able to close children’s learning gaps.

“We meet the children where they are, we get to know them and their parents and we figure out what collective goals they have and work as a team,” says Greener. “So what we’ll do is that we’ll usually take a few steps back and work on some foundational skills, especially in math and English and we will use age-appropriate and interesting topics to work on those foundational skills, and then we build back up from there.”

Grenner says it’s not a lack of desire or effort on the part of the school boards to educate every child, but that there’s a wide variety of learners out there, and the pandemic hasn’t created the ideal situation for any child.

“Post-pandemic, it is just about slowing down and building those relationships back up and getting used to being with a group of kids again in a classroom setting,” says Greener. “And really just slowing down and making sure that the kids are adjusting before throwing them into academics.”

Story Behind the Story: After examining how local school boards in Waterloo Region are dealing with pandemic learning gaps, reporter Genelle Levy set out to explore if there were other creative options parents were using to tackle pandemic learning gaps.