Hopefuls line up as N.L. church hall braces for Chase the Ace draw
ST.JOHN’S,N.L.—Asmallcommunity outside St. John’s, N.L., was a traffic-clogged madhouse Wednesday, as tens of thousands of people sought sudden wealth in the finale of a muchwatched, big-money Chase the Ace contest.
“There’s a lot of big orders coming — people are doubling up their money because it’s the last one,” said Carol O’Brien, a spokesperson for the draw in Goulds, N.L.
People began lining up before dawn at St. Kevin’s Parish hall, and the line was already a kilometre long by 7:30 a.m. local time Wednesday ahead of a draw later in the evening that could be worth $2.5 million or more.
The province has declared the ace of spades must be drawn Wednesday night, and there could be multiple draws until someone is declared the winner.
There are eight cards remaining in the deck.
Goulds has been inundated with Chase the Ace crowds most Wednesdays this summer, buying numbered tickets for about $5 each to vie for the life-changing jackpot.
But organizers have said they didn’t want the draw to interfere with school, which starts in early September in the building next door to St. Kevin’s hall.
O’Brien said there could be as many as 100,000 people Wednesday in her little community.
TORONTO — Math test scores among public elementary school students in Ontario have not improved — in some cases they have decreased slightly — despite a $60-million “renewed math strategy” the government had hoped would help solve the problem.
The latest results of the province’s standardized tests — conducted by the Education Quality and Accountability Office — show that only half of Grade 6 students met the provincial standard in math, unchanged from the previous year. In 2013, about 57 per cent of Grade 6 students met the standard.
And among Grade 3 students, 62 per cent met the provincial standard in math, a one-percentage-point decrease since last year.
Norah Marsh, the CEO of EQAO, said math scores remain a concern and digging deeper reveals one area the province would like to focus on.
“For the students who met the standard in Grade 3, not as many are meeting it in Grade 6,” she said. “Certainly, that’s an area of focus as far as intervention between Grades 3 and 6 so they can achieve better results.”
By Grade 9 the gap widens between the math haves and have-nots. In the math academic stream, 83 per cent of students met the provincial standard, the same score as last year, but only 44 per cent met the standard in the applied math course, a dip of one percentage point.
The EQAO’s report, released Wednesday, said reading has improved slightly for Grade 3 students, with 74 per cent meeting the provincial standard, and remained steady for Grade 6 students, with 81 per cent meeting the provincial standard.