A million dollars of extra Community Link funding will be used to work with disengaged elementary and middle school students who are at risk of quitting school.
At a board of education meeting this week, School District 43 assistant superintendent Julie Pearce laid out a plan to hire learning support teachers, youth workers and program co-ordinators to work with youth and their families and start after-school programs for kids.
Starting in September, the new staff - the equivalent of 10.5 full-time positions - will start programs at Maillard, Sir Frederick Banting and Minnekhada middle schools and their elementary feeder schools.
The new Community Link money is on top of $1.4 million already received from the province and spent on youth workers, literacy and after-school programs at Glen, Seaview and Miller Park elementary schools, Pitt River middle and Terry Fox secondary, as well as subsidized lunches and other programming.
Pearce explained that the new schools covered by Community Link funding were chosen because they have school populations with families on social assistance and don't have a youth worker or a community school co-ordinator.
The goal is to build relationships with students and their families, and offer programs that will keep them in school, Pearce said.
"We are looking at middle schools as a place where we could capture these kids," she said.
As well, the district plans to hire a counsellor specifically to work with disengaged youth and a vice-principal to work at CABE (Coquitlam Alternate Basic Education), which has one of the largest populations of vulnerable students in the district.
Judy Robb, principal of Scott Creek middle school and the president of the Coquitlam Principals' and Vice-Principals' Association, lauded the efforts to focus on middle-school students and their younger cohorts who are at risk of quitting school. Last year, Robb sounded the alarm that more than two dozen middle school students were regularly not attending school based on anecdotal reports from other middle school principals.
A new program called Success for All was started to work with these students but Robb said the extra money for after-school programs, youth workers and learning support teachers will also help.
Still, it won't be easy to convince non-attenders, many of them suffering from anxiety and fear of failure, to go back to school.
"It takes a lifetime to get where they are and it will take more than a minute to get it finished," Robb said.
Programs that are flexible and geared toward student interest could lower the barriers to attending school while after-school programs could keep them in the building longer, she said.
"They might come back for one class at the beginning, then they have somewhere to go."
One concern is that the Community Link top-up is only for a year but SD43 board chair Melissa Hyndes said she expects the funding will continue because the district has worked hard to convince the Ministry of Education there are pockets of need in the district.
"My expectation is that the commitment will continue," Hyndes said, noting that the district can't simply leave these students behind. "Somebody who is 12 years old to be in a situation like that, it's extraordinary. How did that happen? We have to do something to help these kids."
