Chinook report highlights growing need for support services due to classroom complexity
There are more students with intensive needs in the Chinook School Division and it is an ongoing challenge to provide them with the necessary support due to limited resources.
Chinook Superintendent of Learning Courtney Lawrance spoke about the successes and challenges of providing these supports during the presentation of the Student Services status report at a regular Chinook Board of Education meeting, Feb. 12.
“We’re doing our best to prevent them from falling through the cracks,” she said. “We’re very proactive. So we regularly engage in conversations with our schools. … We’re doing our best with more and more limited resources. We’re very strategic in how we spend our dollars and we have good efficiencies, but I would always be advocating for more dollars, because the more dollars you have, the more interventions you can do.”
She added that parents might not have noticed any impact due to funding constraints, because the school division has been so effective in meeting the needs of students.
“Our contingency or complexity grant was approximately $700,000, not a huge amount in terms of budgets, but we’re getting really good results from what we did with that money,” she said. “So if you just had a little bit more funding, you’d hit that many more kids with early interventions.”
This contingency provincial grant was made available to school divisions for the 2023-24 school year as a response to the challenges of classroom complexity, but it presents a dilemma for the Chinook School Division.
“We’re very appreciative of the funding, but it’s really hard to start an initiative and then have the funding disappear, because then we’re left with a choice of do we continue it with the limited funds we already have, or does that initiative have to come to an end,” she said. “So it’s been a little bit of a rock and a hard place, especially with the really good results that are coming out of it.”
The task of Student Services is to support students who need more than what the average classroom can provide. An inclusion and intervention plan (IIP) is developed for most of these students to guide their learning.
Specialized supports are currently provided to 174 students with IIPS. This is an increase of six students compared to last year. These students with IIPS include 52 with autism, representing four additional students compared to the previous year.
“Even though our enrolment is relatively stable, we’re continuing to see more students who are in need of these intensive supports,” she noted.
The school division provides support in relation to behaviour to over 40 students. There has been an increase in aggressive behaviour in some grades and in some classrooms.
“We’ve actually increased our non-violent crisis intervention training,” she noted. “We’ve offered five sessions to date, which typically we offer one or two, and we’re going to offer another one in May before the year ends. Plus, we’re being proactive next year. We’re going to offer sessions in August before school starts.”
According to Lawrance the aggressive behaviour tends to occur more in students at the elementary level, typically in Grade 2-3.
“We’re not unique in Chinook and seeing an increase in aggressiveness,” she said. “It just may show up with different ages and groups across the province. We’re doing our best to support our teachers and our educational assistants. The non-violent crisis intervention has a whole component about verbal de-escalation, so learning those strategies of how do we stop before it turns into a larger incident. We’ve been very supportive and working with our staff to make sure that they have the skills that they need.”
The occurrence of aggressive behaviour in earlier grade levels in the Chinook School Division creates an opportunity to provide them with appropriate support at a young age.
“So you’re able to deal with it when they’re young and teach some of those strategies of how do we deal with frustrations in a more positive way,” she
said. “If you can put those interventions in place early, it should minimize the impact that you see later on.”
There is a growing need for social-emotional supports and counselling caseloads are very heavy in almost every school.
“We’re seeing daily mental health concerns,” she said. “While numbers have come down for depression and anxiety, they’re still relatively high, and we have a lot of kids that need supports. So our counsellors are working very hard.”
Lawrance felt Student Services are doing a good job of coordinator support for schools. There is school level support through student support teachers and teacher assistance teams, but there is also higher-level support offered by three student services coordinators.
“Each of our coordinators actually has different specialties that they provide supports across the division,” she said. “It’s a model that works well, because if you’re struggling and you don’t know what to do, there’s always someone who you can reach out to for support. We spend quite a bit of time in our schools going out to support students, whether it’s in the classroom doing observations, whether it’s working with the team to put support in place, whether its a parent meeting.”
She felt the school division is also achieving success with targeted assessments in Grade 3 and 9, which are strategic years for those evaluations.
“By the time you get to Grade 3, the kids are typically developmentally aware enough that we’ll get a diagnosis, if there’s going to be one that will come from the testing,” she said. “Grade 9 is also strategic, because that assessment will then carry forward to post-secondary for those students. It also informs high school programming. If we had more money, we would do more assessments, but because we’re strategic in how we do them, I would say we’re meeting the needs of the students the best that we can.”
The school division has one full-time divisional psychologist and the other two similar positions are vacant. Recruitment
for these positions is ongoing, but it is difficult to fill due to the high demand for these professionals. The school division is therefore using a contracted educational psychology service as an interim measure to get assessments done.
“We’ve built a really good relationship with our contractor, because divisions are even having trouble securing large numbers of contracted assessments,” she said. “So we’re positioned well for the challenges that we’re facing. Recruitment has been an ongoing issue for years. I don’t see it resolving itself in the short term. It’s going to have to be more long-term solutions.”
The Chinook School Division will continue to look at different options and new approaches to ensure that support services are provided to students.
““We want to continue to build more capacity in our staff for our students with intensive needs,” she said. “What we realize is the number of intensive needs is increasing and our funding is not keeping pace. So with what we do have, how do we build this capacity so that we’re able to support our students? Not just the ways that we always have, but what are some new ways that we can support it and find efficiencies.”