Why disabled kids are missing more school than peers

Tara Carman recently wrote an article about rising absences from school and suggested that the trend may be linked to a growing mental health crisis: Why are so many kids calling in sick for school? That explanation captures part of the reality, yet it overlooks a parallel and far more specific pattern that many families of disabled children have been living inside for years. When you look closely at disability, chronic health, and the collapse of school-based support, a different picture emerges—one that helps explain why absences have escalated so sharply for particular groups of students.

The missing category in attendance reporting

One of the most striking parts of Tara Carman’s story is her admission that it is extraordinarily difficult to understand why absences are rising because districts themselves do not provide useful data.

“CBC News previously reported on school absences in March 2024, gathering complete data on the number of kids missing large amounts of school from eight districts.

That data had no information about the reasons for the absences, so last summer CBC News used freedom of information (FOI) requests to ask every district with more than 25,000 students for what they had on the reasons why.

CBC requested data from the 2018-19 through the 2024-25 school years on excused and unexcused absences, illnesses and chronic absence, which usually means students who missed more than 10 per cent of the school year. CBC selected these points because they are things schools or districts tend to track….

Even when the data came in, it came in such a way that made comparisons between districts impossible. Some districts counted illnesses as a distinct category, while others lumped them in with other types of excused absences such as snow days and religious holidays.

Some districts measured the number of days or periods absent. Others gave us percentages absent. Timeframes were also inconsistent; CBC requested data from 2018-19 to 2024-25 inclusive, but some districts changed their data systems over those years and were only able to provide a portion of it…

The data was such a mess that we can’t say much more than that definitively.

But with this story, as with so many others, the data is just a starting point. It is silent on what kind of illnesses have increased, and why. To understand that, it’s necessary to talk to people close to the issue.”

Why measuring school absences in Canada is so hard by Tara Carmen for CBC Investigations

On paper, absences often appear as a single undifferentiated count. In many districts, the code simply registers a child as “absent” without specifying the reason. This means journalists cannot meaningfully interpret trends, districts cannot identify where harm is accumulating, and families cannot point to data that confirms what they already know: disabled children are missing school for reasons that are distinctly tied to unmet needs.

Disabled bodies carried a distinct burden after Covid

A significant number of autistic children and their families live in hypermobile bodies, and emerging post-viral research shows a clear concentration of dysautonomia, POTS, and mast cell activation syndrome in these populations after Covid. Studies in journals such as Frontiers in Neurology (2024), which reviewed hypermobility in post‑viral dysautonomia, The British Journal of Cardiology (2022), which documented joint hypermobility in post‑Covid POTS patients, and Nature(2022), which reported increased odds of dysautonomia following SARS‑CoV‑2 infection,, The British Journal of Cardiology, and Nature identify elevated rates of joint hypermobility among post-Covid POTS patients and higher odds of dysautonomia following SARS‑CoV‑2 infection. This aligns with what many families have observed: disruptions, infections, and chronic uncertainty place amplified physiological demands on hypermobile and autistic bodies already primed for oxidative stress, sensory overload, and nervous-system instability.

Paediatric research from JAMA Network Open (2023, 2024), including meta‑analyses of new‑onset type 1 and type 2 diabetes in children during the pandemic, further documents a rise in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes diagnoses during the pandemic, with Covid infection itself associated with increased risk of new-onset type 2 diabetes in adolescents. This widening burden of chronic illness does not fall evenly. Families raising disabled or neurodivergent children absorb disproportionate strain because their caregiving structures are already overextended, and any additional health complexity reverberates through attendance, regulation, and capacity.

What emerges across these studies is a coherent pattern: the pandemic altered the health landscape for many families, but it reshaped it most sharply for those already navigating disability. Post-viral conditions, inflammation, disrupted routines, and regulatory overwhelm combined to create bodies that were more exhausted, more fragile, and more dependent on consistent support from schools.

Families raising complex neurodivergent children were parenting through a sustained emergency. They were working while providing full-time support, often without respite. Bodies and nervous systems absorbed that pressure. Illness, exhaustion, burnout, and dysregulation accumulated across years. They were working while providing full-time support, often without respite. Bodies and nervous systems absorbed that pressure. Illness, exhaustion, burnout, and dysregulation accumulated across years.

Disruption to schooling hits families with high support needs hardest

For children who need close, consistent, often one-to-one support to regulate, transition, and participate, any disruption to staffing creates an immediate collapse in access. Families like ours live at the mercy of staffing fluctuations: a sick day, an internal reassignment, a last-minute coverage shift, or an unexpected vacancy can dismantle the entire scaffolding that allows a child to walk through the school door. These disruptions accumulate across months and years, and they create a chronic instability that families compensate for through exhaustive emotional labour, flexible work arrangements, and constant vigilance.

Disabled children often rely on predictable adult support to manage noise, transitions, sensory load, executive-function demands, and the social complexity of classrooms. When that predictable support is present, attendance stabilises. When it disappears, even for a day, the nervous system registers it as threat, and attendance can collapse for weeks.

Districts know this dynamic, yet they continue to treat essential support as a flexible staffing resource rather than as an accommodation.

Misallocation of Covid funds and the structural withdrawal of support

The temporary Covid grants were never intended to replace legally mandated disability accommodations, yet our principal told me that she had used the funds to hire my children’s SSA supports. For a brief period, this misallocation created meaningful access for children who had been underserved for years. When the Covid funding expired, the same principal laid the support staff off that were supporting my children. This withdrawal had nothing to do with children’s needs and everything to do with budgeting.

The moment the temporary Covid funds expired, the school retracted that support, laying the SSAs off who supported my children. The explanation was blunt: the money was gone. Yet my children’s needs were unchanged, and the Human Rights Code does not allow essential accommodations to be removed simply because a specific grant has ended. Once a support has demonstrated that it enables access, withdrawing it without consultation, documentation, or alternative planning moves directly into discriminatory territory.

The return to unsupported schooling destabilised my children’s ability to attend.

Why disabled students are disproportionately represented in rising absences

Absences among disabled students increase when:

• chronic health issues intensify after Covid
• families navigate POTS, MCAS, long Covid, or post-viral fatigue
• routines shift faster than the nervous system can stabilise
• EA hours are reduced, inconsistent, or withdrawn
• sensory and regulation needs go unmet
• school environments become unpredictable or unsafe
• families must protect children from harm and exhaustion
• trust in the school erodes after repeated failures in support

These absences are rational responses to inaccessible conditions.

Attendance data must be disaggregated by disability

If we want to understand the real drivers of this trend, journalists and policymakers must ask districts to provide attendance data broken down by disability designation, IEP status, and chronic health category. Without this, the story disappears into a vague mental-health frame that obscures the children most affected and the systemic decisions that shaped their experience.

Calling upon the Ombudsperson to release attendance and disability data

There is also a role for the Ombudsperson here. The province’s ongoing investigation into student exclusion already recognises that disabled children experience disproportionate barriers to access, yet the public has almost no clarity about how absences track alongside disability, health status, and support allocation. The Ombudsperson has the authority to request, review, and release aggregate data that districts have so far withheld, including patterns of absenteeism among designated students, children with IEPs, and children whose support hours were altered following the end of Covid grants. A formal call for the release of this data would help illuminate the systemic forces driving these absences and would ensure that reporting and policy decisions are grounded in the lived reality of disabled families.