Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In the 2013 Alberta Achievement Tests, they talk about factors that give our smaller communities and larger centres test results. One of the biggest factors that brought our percentage down was the children’s attendance in schools.
I want to ask the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment, in order to raise the level of success for our young people, what is the department doing along with education boards in communities to ensure that children go to school, stay in school and bring their grades up? Right now, the biggest factor is children not attending school.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The honourable Minister of Education, Culture and Employment, Mr. Lafferty.
Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. This particular area is a prime focus of my department to improve the overall education system in the Northwest Territories. The students learning and success will improve if attendance rates also improve. The Member is alluding to that. Ensuring students attend regularly is a shared responsibility between the school boards, ourselves as the Department of Education, families and the community at large.
We are doing what we can. Within Educational Renewable and Innovation, we want to focus on students’ well-being through safety and care as school practice and nutritious food in our schools and also enhancing the school/community relations through elders in schools, residential school resources, staff training and also providing personalized quality of education through focused inclusive learning supports, career orientation and distance learning programming. Those are just some of the key areas we’ve initiated within our department and we will continue to make those improvements in our educational programming. Mahsi.
I do wish the department all the success in their initiatives to raise the level of attendance of our children for them to go to school.
Is the Minister looking at some innovative ways that the school itself can do to get the children and parents saying it’s important that your child gets the proper amount of rest so they can come to school fresh and be ready to hit the school work? Is his department working with the educational boards to do a one-time initiative, as they did a long time ago, and get the teachers to go and visit the families at their homes, sit down with the parents, talk with them at their homes rather than have the parents come to the school and meet with the teachers? Can we do a reversal on that?
We are discussing both of either the parents going into the school system or the teachers going into households to talk about attendance as well. Parents and guardians are encouraged to ensure their children attend school on a regular basis, Mr. Speaker. When an individual misses one day a week of school over the life of high school, it equals one year without school. That has a tremendous impact. So there should be attendance of 90 percent or more. That’s our target that we want to achieve. We are working very closely with the school boards to achieve that. We are developing various action plans geared towards how we can improve attendance in our school systems. Mahsi.
In today’s life, students bring with them lots of issues to school. Some of these issues they have they need support on. Is the school now looking at ways to help the children with their emotional and mental issues, so they can have support other than to hold on to them and not deal with them? That sometimes prevents a child from attending school. Is there support for them such as counselling services in our small schools for the kids?
The quickest answer would be yes. Again, we are working with school boards to establish those kinds of support mechanisms. Again, poor attendance is a symptom of underlying issues, such as students being disengaged in learning, negative feelings within our schools towards students or families, a sense of not belonging, and the safety factor is a huge issue. It’s a priority for school boards. Our prime focus is on student well-being through safe and caring school practices, providing nutritious food in our school system. Those are fundamental and what we’ve heard from our elders and educators in the school system that we must provide to our education system in the Northwest Territories. Those are areas that we will push forward on. Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.
Colleagues, before we go on today, we’ve been going through eight questions and eight answers today and it takes 15 minutes. Your preamble and your responses, if you could tighten it up a little bit for the House, thank you. The honourable Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
