Yes we do. I think it even goes back further than that. We're talking about very remote fly-in communities in isolated parts of northwestern Ontario. Not all of them have high schools, so they have children who are graduating into grade 8 and grade 9, and they have to go to school in Thunder Bay or somewhere else away from their families. It becomes a reluctance. I think in some of our communities the high school graduation rate is around 55% or 50%.
One of the challenges we've done is that we go further down the chain and try to engage the youth at a very young age to give them a reason to identify that they need to stay in school to get the education they need to create careers for themselves. We do that in mining programs. We do that in arts programs. We do that in whatever way we think can help the youth stay in school.
for example, we had a summer camp after one of our mining programs. The principal told us in September, “We don't know what's going on, but last year, on a normal day in October we would have five kids in our classes. This year we have 52.”
So it's to get the message out that there are career opportunities and opportunities for those who want to put in the work and effort to become educated and become trained. There are opportunities there. We have to get that message in at a very young age in these communities. That's really one of our focuses. Hopefully we will get them to a point where we increase the high school graduation rates.
Also, specific to your question, the equivalency is definitely a problem. So we're getting this from all angles, equivalency plus graduation.