“Children from poor backgrounds face many obstacles to accessing education. These include…not having access to educational materials or teachers at some point but even when these are in place, children living in poverty often don’t have their basic needs met.”
To better manage students from highly vulnerable areas, the district routinely communicates with teachers to identify students who may or may not be on a path to graduation.
“We know students that are going to struggle right from the first day in kindergarten. They’re children who are new to our country, they’re children from low socioeconomic situations and they’re Indigenous children, not all of them but a lot of them.”
The affects of the COVID-19 pandemic on students long-term is still unknown.
Students were directed to online learning after an extended spring break in March 2020 before a majority returned to in-class learning in September.
Ted Cadwallader, SD68 director of instruction for Indigenous learning, said early indications suggest many graduates from last year are not immediately moving on to higher levels of education after after their experience with online learning in grade 12.
“It’s been really difficult because our post secondaries are operating in an online environment as well. It’s been gruelling. Some of them have decided not to go to university this year because it was just so hard to be online for that amount of time.”
Superintendent Saywell said the raw grad rate data doesn’t tell the entire story.
“We are trending in the right direction, that’s what we concentrate on. We’re improving every single year.”
In all sub-categories measured by the district, graduation rates have climbed over the last five years. Only 56 per cent of Indigenous students completed grade 12 in 2016 while the overall grad rate climbed around three per cent over the same time.
A full breakdown of SD68 grad rates is available here.
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