Mr. Chairman, committee members, thank you for the important work you're doing and for the privilege to address you today on behalf of an ever-growing number of students and communities being served by Pathways to Education Canada. Thank you to the federal government for considering an investment in our program, which is lowering dropout rates of at-risk youth and helping them make the all-important transition to post-secondary education and meaningful employment.
Our data proves that investing in our most vulnerable youth and the communities they come from will deliver the best return on investment any community or government can make. It will help close the troubling gap between the haves and have nots and it will result in safer and healthier communities, more informed and engaged citizens, a more diversified and productive workforce, and a stronger economy.
We all know the problem. Each year we see thousands of Canadian students making life-altering decisions to drop out of school. In most cases, this seemingly simple and personal decision puts our youth on a downward-spiralling course that affects us all with a ripple effect that leads to lower wages, higher unemployment, a diminished tax base, higher rates of poverty, and greater dependency on social assistance.
Lower levels of education lead to more crime, threatening the safety of our neighbourhoods and putting greater strains on our justice system. It also leads to higher incidence of drug use and teenage pregnancy, putting greater strains on our health care system. The data on this is clear, be it from Statistics Canada or the countless studies from here or abroad. What is less well known is the extent of this problem. Average provincial dropout rates across the country hover between 20% and 30%, and most major cities have low-income communities where the dropout rate ranges from 40% to 60%. We also know that this problem is more severe for a growing number of children of first- and second-generation immigrants and aboriginal families, where we are seeing dropout rates of 70% and higher.
Pathways to Education Canada is a charitable organization with a laser-sharp focus on reducing these dropout rates. We do so by helping at-risk youth complete high school and make that transition to post-secondary education successful, with the goal of helping them achieve meaningful employment and a better future than their historical path might have afforded them.
Our program operates through carefully selected networks of community agencies who deliver a comprehensive set of supports, which include academic support where volunteers provide after-school tutoring in core subject areas; social support where volunteers run group mentoring activities aimed at increasing social skills, communication skills, problem solving, and career planning; and financial supports aimed at reducing barriers to school completion and providing incentives, which include bus tickets and lunch vouchers while in the program and a scholarship that is earned through participation in the program and paid out to post-secondary institutions only on the completion of the program. Plus it has one-on-one mentoring, coaching, and other supports that tie together these various components and serve as a single point of accountability for these students and these individuals who serve as an advocate for the students within the school system.
So that is what we do, but what have we achieved?
Research and evaluation are key components of the Pathways to Education program. We have a highly disciplined approach to outcomes measurement, applying learning from our research to our replication and program improvement process. The early hope for our program was to reduce high school dropout rates of youth to a level that was similar to or better than the city average. To date, results of our initial site in Toronto's Regent Park continue to far exceed that goal. We have over five cohorts, 850 youth, and the dropout rate for this youth group in this community has declined from 56% to now 12%, a reduction of more than 75% and now approximately half of the city of Toronto and provincial averages.