Students in School District 57 will be reaching for the stars once again as the new academic year kicks off on Tuesday.
Enrolment numbers are expected to be healthy once again despite the Delta-driven fourth wave of the pandemic.
Acting Superintendent of Schools, Cindy Heitman spoke with MyPGNow.com.
“We are still unsure as to how many students will be returning back into the classroom or will continue with the distanced-learning option. We’ll have more accurate numbers next week but it will be consistent with where we are just under 13-thousand students.”
Heitman anticipates a drop in distanced learning participating compared to the previous year.
“I know many families are looking forward to having some normalcy back into their lives and school is one of those consistent things with regular supports and routines and I think with the return of some our extra-curricular activities and sports teams are also really encouraging.”
According to the 2020-21 data from the Ministry of Education, there are 72,149 Indigenous students in BC – 3,044 more than the year prior.
In addition, BC has just under 54-thousand students enrolled in French immersion, a drop of 980 fewer than the previous year.
Heitman stated both categories remain quite strong within SD 57.
“We’ve always been between 3,600 and 3,800 Indigenous students and we are anticipating that to be pretty much the same this year. In terms of our French Immersion numbers, so far they look rather consistent to where they have been. We saw a tremendous amount of growth in French Immersion in the previous three years.”
In terms of class sizes by the number of children province-wide in 2020-21 they were:
* 21.4 in grades 8 to 12
* 23.2 in grades 4 to 7
* 19.2 in grades 1 to 3
* 17.4 in kindergarten
As for what the breakdown looks like for SD 57, Heitman expects to follow a similar pattern when compared to the rest of the province and will follow a strict capping system.
“We cannot have more than 20 kids in a kindergarten classroom, we cannot have more than 22 students in grades one thru three, we can’t have more than 29 students in grades four through seven and we are unable to go over 30 for grades eight through twelve.”
Heitman also has her eyes set on trying to boost up the graduation rate among Indigenous students within SD 57.
She admits while the school board has made tremendous strides in this category, more improvement is needed.
“Over the past ten years we have seen an increase of 25% but we still fall well below the provincial average.”
“In our district, there is probably about a 27 or 28 percent gap between our Indigenous and non-Indigenous graduation rates so there is quite a bit of a gap in those two sub-populations.”
Across BC, 71.1% of Indigenous students completed high school in 2019-20, an increase of 7.4% from 66.2% in the 2016-17 school year.
Concerns in School District 57, regarding educational outcomes for Indigenous students, relationships with First Nations communities, allocation of resources, and strategic planning were made public after a report was issued by the Ministry of Education last week.
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