District needs to track Aboriginal student progress

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According to figures from Statistic Canada, Aboriginal students in Toronto are twice as likely to drop out of school as their non-Aboriginal peers.

The problem faced by the Toronto District School Board is that, in order to access more funding to address the issue, it needs more detailed information about the Aboriginal students within the school system, explained Cathy Pawis, the central principal in charge of Aboriginal education for the board.

To rectify that problem, Pawis must come up with a culturally sensitive method of gathering statistics about Aboriginal students.

"One of the issues that came out loud and clear is that we couldn't really determine which programs were needed because we couldn't really pin-point where our students are in the schools because in Toronto we are so diverse ... Aboriginal students tend to be invisible within the system," said Pawis.

The Toronto District School Board was created in January 1998 when seven separate boards of education were amalgamated into one. The largest school board in Canada, it is responsible for providing education to more than 280,000 students living within the city of Toronto.

While the school board has taken a number of steps to reach out to and support its Aboriginal students-including offering tradition-based curriculum through the First Nations School of Toronto, and inclusion of Aboriginal history and perspectives across the curriculum-more needs to be done. But quantifying that need hasn't been so easy.

What is needed is a mechanism to identify Aboriginal students within the system, Pawis said.

"Anecdotally we know that our students (Aboriginal) are not doing very well ... we don't have hard data to back that up. It's not well documented, but we do have Stats Canada studies."

Pawis was one of the founding members of the Toronto District School Board's Native Education Committee. The committee recognized a need from the outset for programs such as mentoring, tutors, language programs and addictions counselling but without the statistics to support requests for programming, their hands were tied.

"We couldn't move any further forward with our recommendations because we hit that systemic barrier -'Well, how do you know we need another program?', and 'How do you know our Aboriginal students aren't doing well?' Those are the questions that kept coming back to us because we didn't have the data. We couldn't really identify a need without the statistics behind us."

The problem her committee faces is gathering the statistics it needs from an Aboriginal community that has been studied to death and is reluctant to participate in more studies.

One place to start in the search for data might be organizations such as the Native Canadian Centre and Native Child and Family Services that may be willing to provide client lists to the school board, she said. She is also hoping the Urban Aboriginal Council in Toronto will help spread the message that data collection is necessary.

If the board's efforts at collecting data are successful, Pawis said, its work may be used as a pilot for similar initiatives in other cities across the country.

"It's not that people are asking us to do this kind of data collection, but I think that when they encounter a problem and ask for a program, it reinforces the need for it."