PASS working to help students stay in school

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The Thunder Bay-Rainy River school district has announced an initiative designed to help Aboriginal students stay in school.

The program is called Pathway to Aboriginal Student Success (PASS), and is part of the larger $1.5 million Learning to Age 18 project put together by Northern Ontario Education Leaders (NOEL), a group comprised of eight school boards and 10 district school authorities. The funding for that project in turn comes from the provincial government's $18 million Students At Risk program, which is aimed at increasing the number of students in the province who remain in school after the age of 16.

Terry Ellwood is co-ordinator of the PASS project and superintendent of education for the Rainy River District School Board. Ellwood said the program is needed because recent data shows Aboriginal student graduation and achievement rates in the region are less than half the rates for non-Aboriginal students.

Ellwood said the problem is not limited to Northern Ontario and has gone on for years but is only now being addressed.

One of the problems the school district faces in improving success rates for its Aboriginal students is that enough funding for Aboriginal students is not being allocated because no one has an accurate picture of how many Aboriginal students the district is serving.

"In Ontario here we don't know who our Aboriginal students are. We do not have an identification process here that allows Aboriginal students to self-identify, which they do in B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, and which they are looking at in Manitoba," said Ellwood.

There is information about which Aboriginal students are coming to district schools from First Nation communities because the district has education agreements with the communities, but there is no system in place to identify urban Aboriginal and Metis students. A self-identification process is needed so data can be collected and progress can be measured, Ellwood said.

Ellwood said one of reasons why Aboriginal students are trailing behind non-Aboriginal students in their test scores is because they have problems finding their place within the school system

"We have found that Aboriginal students sometimes do not feel comfortable in a public school setting, or in a band school setting," he said.

One of the ways the school district is addressing this issue is to begin setting up schooling and credit courses in area friendship centres. These courses are being made available both for older school-aged students, and for students who have been out of the education system and want to return to complete their high school. Some Aboriginal students are also having trouble making the transition from on-reserve schooling to public schooling, Ellwood said. Usually schools in First Nation communities only go up to Grade 8, meaning students have to attend a public school in a nearby community for the higher grades. It is in Grade 9 and Grade 10 where many Aboriginal students have problems.

"If they make it past Grade 10 they will generally graduate," said Ellwood.

Transition courses are offered to help students adjust to public school, Ellwood said, and students can also take make up courses if they fail without being held back. However more assistance is needed for Aboriginal students and this is where funding for PASS will be helpful.

One of the areas where additional support is needed is literacy, Ellwood said.

"One of our projects is a leader literacy program where students who have already reached grades 7, 8, 9, who are struggling with literacy will get one-to-one support in literacy development everyday for a period of 15 weeks," he said.

"They work one-to -ne with a reading coach to improve their reading and writing skills for 40 minutes a day."

Ellwood said that a pilot project done last year with this program was very successful.