Pilot project aims to bolster school attendance
A new initiative to bolster school attendance in Nova Scotia will see 14 attendance support workers hired in the new year through pilot projects across the province.
The Council to Improve Classroom Conditions is providing $1.9 million over the next two years to fund the projects.
Council member Jennifer Bruce, a teacher at
E.B. Chandler Junior High in Amherst, announced the initiative on Wednesday at the Nova Scotia Teachers Union offices in Halifax.
“As a teacher myself, in the classroom, when I see an empty seat I wonder to myself ‘why isn’t that student there,’” Bruce said. “This attendance support worker, their responsibility and part of their job is to go out and find the reason why those students are not there and help them get back into that seat.”
Bruce said they will be tasked with exploring why a student may be absent and will be able to work with the students and their families to “seek individualized solutions” for absenteeism.
“They have many responsibilities but the main responsibility that they have, first of all, is to find out the reason why the students are not there and then go back out into the community, find them wherever they are and to bring them back into school,” Bruce said.
“In some cases, I believe it may be a simple solution why they’re not in school and in some cases, it’ll be more complex. They will be able to provide some community supports, some direction about where those families and students can get the help they need.”
As part of their mandate, the workers will go where the students are.
“They do have a budget for transportation to move around to find the students,” Bruce said.
While they are expected to locate the kids, Bruce said, the intention is not to return to the old concept of truancy police.
“I believe that the goal perhaps is the same but I think the approach is much different,” she said. “There’s the idea of finding the students first. And then there’s also applying an individualized solution — what that student needs to get back into school. This is not about consequences and punishment, this is about engaging students.”
Bruce stressed that there would be many solutions the worker would be able to offer in trying to get that student back into class, ranging from making sure they are fed if they are hungry, have boots to wear in winter or an alarm clock to wake up in the morning, along with many other options.
“And they would be able to link students and families to necessary community supports and school supports that are available.”
Those hired for the jobs will be teachers or those able to be certified as such, but they will not be expected to do both. The attendance support worker jobs will be full time. There is an urgency to the plan, too.
“We’re looking for boards to hire quite quickly and we are looking for this to begin in the new year,” she said.
School boards will nominate schools to take part in the pilot projects, with the nominations reviewed by the Education Department and the NSTU. The pilot will run until June 2019.