The biggest challenge is to make our students bilingual within our community called Glendon College. Approximately 20 per cent of our 2,400 students are francophones. The others are students who took core French or French immersion at school. We need to make them even more bilingual, and this could be done with additional resources.
Students need to be highly motivated, and we congratulate them for this undertaking. However, upon their arrival, they have to make decisions with regard to the grades that they will get or the challenges they will have to face. If they take courses in English and they are therefore required to do their work in English, they think that, ultimately, their grade may be lower and perhaps they may not achieve their objectives later. So, our challenge is to make our students more bilingual.
I want to come back to the exchange programs. These programs certainly may be one solution. Sending our students into a francophone environment, be it in another country or in another province, would be ideal. Everyone knows that. By immersing oneself in the culture and the language it takes less time to achieve one's goal.
We are trying to create this within the walls of Glendon College. Ms. Barbot, who was here, perhaps saw that kind of work we are doing. We are trying to create a community to provide them with this, but within a minority context. That is our biggest challenge, in my opinion.
The second question concerned our greatest success. At the risk of sounding a bit strange, our greatest success is continuing to exist with the same challenge. It is continuing to be there and, furthermore, not only our teachers, but also our directors, continue to share the same goal of turning students into bilingual citizens. This is an excellent achievement, because we are celebrating our 40th anniversary this year. As a result, 40 years later, we are still facing the same challenge, and we are standing strong.