All right. Thank you kindly.
I work for Prairie Rose School Division, which services rural areas all around the city of Medicine Hat.
Rural poverty has some interesting aspects that are unique compared to the challenges faced in more urban centres. We serve north all the way to New Brigden, which is in the Oyen area. We serve Ralston and Jenner, and then from Foremost through to Bow Island. The geographic area is very vast.
It is a moral imperative that every student be systemically supported regardless of their socioeconomic status or any other background variables to reach equitable educational outcomes. A comprehensive framework for addressing poverty has been created by this poverty coalition team. I'm excited to consider the role that education in our area might play in the realization of this plan.
In the policy brief there is some theoretical and empirical support for framing schools as vehicles for improved community outcomes and a discussion of the potential and current roles that we play in the implementation of this framework
Adverse childhood experiences, which are often referred to as ACEs, have a far-reaching impact on children's neurophysiology and on the academic and non-academic competencies required for school success, such as language, working memory, executive functioning, persistence, aggression, and avoidance. Ample evidence exists that the physical, psychological, and emotional burden of enduring high levels of cumulative risk is a driver in unequal achievement.
Schools can play a key role by implementing the successful community involvement plans that influence both beliefs and educational outcomes by mitigating some of the risk, resulting in the attainment of higher levels of education and assisting students in building social capital within their community.
I'd like to speak to a problem that is very apparent in southern Alberta and in areas of Manitoba as well, and it relates to the idea of “opportunity to learn”, which is an academic concept that has been created by Gee. They argue that for “opportunity to learn”, affordances are not enough. “Affordances” refer to any perceived action or possibilities that are created by organizations. In order to actually attain “opportunity to learn”, a person must have the capacity to turn an affordance into an effectivity, which means they must actually realize outcomes.
In this area, we serve a large Mennonite population that speaks Low German, and these students often miss vast chunks of school. They're encouraged to leave the school system by grade 9, and females are often encouraged to leave much earlier than that. In congregated home-school settings, uncertified teachers and often people who are illiterate are running these settings, and these people are often segregated from the larger community.
We have made significant efforts and strides in addressing the educational needs of this community, including establishing programs in health care aid and culinary arts that target females to learn. In their communities they're often allowed to work in those fields. This means it may be possible for these females to be independent in the future, should the need or want ever arise.
Continued efforts in this regard are critical in order to meet the growing needs of this population. The numbers of these children are difficult to estimate, because they have a migration lifestyle; however, we know that in our immediate area we are attempting to serve well over 2,000 of these students.
I'd also like to talk to you today about community system planning. We have a program in our area called Fresh Start for School in which over 35 local, provincial, and federal organizations assist 330 students and their families at the beginning of the year. The philosophy is that when families are well, children are well and better positioned to learn.
Here is a quick narrative around this. We had a young gentleman attending one of our high schools whose shoes were so small his toes were coming out of the end. When this program delivered those shoes to him, he actually cried with joy. He was able to reduce a number of stresses in his life, which meant he was better able to engage in the curriculum we were providing in that school and more likely to reach success as he moved forward.
These organizations include health, so people are able to receive everything from immunizations to haircuts at the site. Everything is amalgamated, so people are also able to enrol in services, the goal being that once you've used this program, you won't need to use it again.
Having said that, we also know this will not end poverty and that further work is needed to better integrate these services so that referral processes are amalgamated and we're able to have a consistent response, rather than a one-time effort.
The next thing I'd like to talk about is the business innovation that is occurring. We've established a number of dual credit opportunities that allow students to seek trade certifications and begin their work on college credits and other types of certifications while they are still in high school. This helps with the school-to-work transition and helps reduce costs for students for whom post-secondary education seems financially out of reach or who are required to work. We've also established two night schools that allow children access to educational outcomes, particularly our Mennonite population and other children who have to work. These are run by certified teachers, and we keep them open to the general public and have flexible enrolment. We're also working hard to ensure that we have the technological infrastructure so that people can access these programs remotely.
Transportation is probably our largest barrier. Funding models fail to account for our vast geography. As a result, deficits within the transportation budget are required annually, just to ensure that children make it to school every day. Further, rural poverty is less researched and less mitigated. Services do not scale in our rural areas and are more difficult to access due to transportation. Therefore, resources allocated to these citizens end up, in large part, going towards windshield time in order to ensure professionals are able to reach people who are desperate for the limited therapy hours.
We'd also like to note that within our working population, the Alberta school employee benefit plan notes that one in three teachers, or one of their family members, accesses antidepression or anti-anxiety medication, as compared to one in 10 in the general Alberta population. We know that we need to improve wellness in our schools and in our educational system, so as a result, we have been implementing a comprehensive wellness model.
We are also training six facilitators in a Connect program, which is empirically supported attachment-based parenting. These programs will be taught free of charge to parents in over 10 different communities to help assist with the mounting socio-emotional needs that we are seeing in our child population.
I would like to conclude with the work that we have done in early childhood education spaces. Across the communities we serve, we have a number of early childhood education spaces within our schools managed by local boards and taught by certified teachers. Additionally, space-sharing approaches have been created in a number of sites whereby private child care spaces are offered within our schools. This saves on infrastructure costs, assists parents with transportation expenses, and also allows for shared expertise. This work needs to be expanded.
Finally, I would like to conclude with the work we would like to see next, and that is the creation of a child wellness centre where we would be better able to comprehensively serve the mounting socio-emotional needs that we are seeing across our communities. This would include family wellness therapy, an amalgamation of service providers, and leadership through appreciative inquiry, which recognizes the strength of the families that we're serving and also the various professionals who are working to achieve the mitigation of adverse childhood experience.