A petition asking that the Good Spirit School Division (GSSD) revisit its funding formula for support workers to make it both more responsive to the special learning needs of the student populace and more flexible to the ongoing enrolment of students during the school year garnered 184 signatures.
Support workers include school counsellors, speech therapists and educational assistants, said a release from Aliki Tryphonopoulos of Kamsack. The petition circulated in the Kamsack area in late March and early April and was discussed in the April 9 edition of the Kamsack Times.
The aim of the petition was to secure more support workers for schools like Victoria School, Kamsack Comprehensive Institute and Yorkton’s Dr. Brass, where standardized testing scores in areas like literacy are lower than the average in the school division, the release said. For example, Victoria School’s Fountas and Pinell literacy results revealed that 55 per cent of the students in grades 1 to 4 read below expectations.
Failure to read at level by Grade 3 is correlated with negative outcomes like a lower likelihood of graduating from high school and a higher incidence of poor health, divorce, unemployment and incarceration, it said.
A member of the Victoria School’s Community Council and one of the community members who worked on the petition, Tryphonopoulos met with Quintin Robertson, the GSSD’s deputy director and Mark Forsythe, its Superintendent of Education, on May 27 to discuss the petition.
Robertson and Forsythe presented statistics indicating that Victoria School has more educational assistant hours than the suggested allocation based on its rubric, has granted all requests for additional support from Victoria School over the last two years, has a pupil/teacher ratio of 16.38, and has 1.24 full-time student support teachers allocated at the school, the release said.
The school division also has no additional money to allocate to support workers and would prefer to use any additional funds for staffing to hire more teachers, whom it believes, are most qualifi ed to support the students, it said.
Robertson also cited education philosopher John Hattie’s Visible Learning, where the teacher-student ratio is not as important as the way the teacher teaches, it said. The GSSD’s current focus for dealing with the low testing scores at schools like Victoria School is to address the problem of truancy.
According to its statistics, 41 per cent of the students at Victoria School were chronically absent in March and April, it said. The GSSD administration maintains that if the students attend regularly, their learning outcomes will improve.
Robertson also informed Tryphonopoulos that the next step for the petition, should she wish to pursue it, would be to present it to Ken Krawetz, the MLA for the Canora-Pelly constituency.
While Tryphonopoulos said she agrees that truancy is a critical issue and one that parents and guardians must address within the Kamsack community, she still believes
that more support, both teachers and support workers, are necessary to meet the learning needs of the students at the Kamsack schools. She said she has worked in libraries and
literacy for over a decade across Canada and after observing several classes and volunteering with one of them at Victoria School, she recognizes the impossible task that many of the teachers have in reaching all students who do attend because of their broad range of levels and learning needs.
Tryphonopoulos is particularly concerned that so many students recognized as having special learning needs by the school are not offi cially recognized, which happens for many reasons. She said she has also observed that the staff of Victoria School, whom she has found to be dedicated, professional and enthusiastic, has made excellent use of its limited resources to help the children.
Student assemblies include recognition and rewards for classes and students who have good attendance.
Tryphonopoulos said she thanks the community for its support of the petition and urges community members to express their interest in the Kamsack schools.
“Volunteering, sitting in on a class, reading to a child, joining the under-staffed School Community Councils or making a solid commitment to ensure children attend school are all extremely helpful,” she said.
