Children and youth

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The winter/spring 2020 issue focuses on the ways in which the neoliberal education agenda and austerity governments are reshaping education across the country, and the impact of these changes on kids — particularly the most vulnerable — and communities. But it also illustrates the passion with which the public will defend its schools and support their educators and education workers. It includes a cross-country scan of standardized assessment policies. 
The summer/fall 2020 Our Schools/ Our Selves digs into the underlying issues of equity and access that have been revealed and exacerbated by the COVID-19-related shutdown and subsequent move to online and remote learning; a cross-country scan provides an overview of the various funding mechanisms currently in place for public education in each province and territory to illustrate the link between funding, policy and priorities. 
What have post-pandemic school reopening policies revealed about provincial priorities, and how have public education advocates, parents, students and communities responded? Can we take this moment in time to effectively advocate for a vision of public education that is more responsive to student needs, more reflective of the diverse communities our schools must serve, and more aware of the role schools play as places of learning and places of work, particularly in the context of a global pandemic and a growing mental health crisis?
Maria Rose Sikyea is a young Dené artist living in Yukon with her adorable three-year-old. When I spoke to her in November, she was expecting a second child, whom she hoped would be delivered with the assistance of a midwife. But like many others in her situation, Sikyea faced a considerable roadblock: Yukon is the only Canadian jurisdiction that does not offer access to government-provided and funded midwifery. 
"If we learn anything from COVID-19," write Lindsay McLaren and Trish Hennessy in their cover feature for this issue, "it should be that we need to build and foster a more comprehensive version of public health that acts on what we know about the social determinants of well-being." Economy and health are not separate things, they argue, and public health policy should not be limited to matters of primary care.
Canada has now passed the 30-year mark since the all-party resolution in the House of Commons to eliminate poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000. In Nova Scotia, there is a widening gap between the national child poverty rate and the province’s child poverty rate. While child poverty is anything but eradicated in Canada, it remains an even more looming problem in Nova Scotia.
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Photo by Francis Mariani (Flickr Creative Commons)