The more school students miss, the worse off their overall outcome in life could be.
Post-pandemic data from the Rainy River District School Board shows a rise in chronic absenteeism among students in the region. Beth Fairfield, Superintendent of Education for RRDSB, said this is especially true for First Nations students. In an attempt to combat the trend, Fairfield said the board plans to improve engagement through cultural competency training, the development of a learning hub and a modular program currently being piloted in its schools.
“Any student who has more than 10 percent absences for the school year is considered chronically absent,” said Fairfield.
“That’s the definition that’s used, not only within the province but just for anyone doing any work with attendance and research in attendance.”
This equates to roughly two absences each month.
“If you’re missing more than 19 days of school, you’re considered chronically absent,” said Fairfield.
“Our number of students who were chronically absent was even higher, it was really worrying.”
However, RRDSB is seeing improvement.
“We’re not where we would like to be, but we are seeing a positive trend. So that’s the good news,” said Fairfield.
“If you looked at the provincial data and the regional data, you’ll see that we’re not that far off from the region. Historically, the region has always had a higher number of students who would meet that definition of chronically absent, when compared to the province. Our geography, our weather, [our] transportation, historical trauma, there’s a variety of different reasons.”
There’s also a jump in the likelihood of absenteeism when looking at the attendance trends of First Nations students, something Fairfield said points to the board still having work to do to combat the issue, though she said she feels the board will always have more work to do in terms of cultural competency.
“I think we have to continually work with our staff around cultural competency,” said Fairfield. “Whether it’s cultural competency for our Indigenous, Métis, or First Nations… We see that our communities are changing. Also, we’re having more newcomers come to our community, so we need to just continually learn and become aware.”
“It’s that idea of intentionally centering diverse voices and identities, right? Whether it’s culture, race, or a variety of different ways people identify,” Fairfield continued.
“[It’s] bringing those teachings into our classrooms that is going to improve learning for everyone, and just not only improve the learning but also the engagement for our students, especially those who have been historically marginalized.”
There’s also a learning hub being proposed as a way to raise engagement for all students.
“It’s an opportunity for students to be able to have some choice in their learning,” said Fairfield.
“We’ve been working in partnership with other boards to develop small modules that when you do four of them in total, they are the equivalent of a credit so that students can have an opportunity to not only have some choice in what they’re learning, but we’re hoping it will also improve their engagement because they’re able to choose things that they might be interested in. One that we created was a trapping [module,]. That was through one of the teachers who works in the alternative education program at UNFC. He helped, along with Shannon Westover.
Fairfield said the decision to hold a trapping module was based on the level of interest they expected the module might hold for students in the region, as well as the uniqueness of such a module.
“It’s unique to our area and might also pique the interest of people from other boards in southern Ontario, and other students who might be interested in learning about that,” she said of the module.
“So this is like a collaborative project with some other boards down in Southern Ontario, and Shannon’s been the lead on that.”
Fairfield said the hope is to have it fine-tuned and ready to roll out for the coming school year.
