Superintendent of schools Tom Longridge presented his annual report to the board of education at last week’s public meeting, and he says while district schools are performing well academically relative to the rest of the province, there are certainly some things that need to be addressed.
Some of the positives within the district highlighted by Longridge’s 2016 report include increasing graduation rates – which were already above provincial averages – increasing numeracy and numeracy scores on standardized testing, high levels of safety and mental health awareness within schools and physical improvements to facilities such as increasing the number of wheelchair ramps, completion of seismic upgrading on many facilities, meeting carbon emission targets four years early and increased recycling programs within schools.
These positives are backed in the report by various forms of data, from surveys of parents, teachers and students to results of academic testing.
Longridge does admit, however, that there are many challenges within the district that he and district staff will be working on as they go forward.
One of those challenges is the age and condition of the facilities within the district.
Longridge says the district receives frequent complaints from students, staff and parents about the cleanliness of schools, and although they do their best to keep schools as clean as possible, it’s difficult to achieve a standard above “moderately dingy” when you’re dealing with aging schools like many of the ones in our district.
He also cites the need for building business cases to but before the government to fund new schools, since the funding to repair the ones we already have “is not available to the degree required.”
The age of the buildings in the district, Longridge also says in his report, “makes it difficult to accommodate new curriculum and student needs,” like implementing gender neutral bathrooms and changing facilities.
And while the academic testing shows improvement over previous years, Longridge says in his report there are concerns on that front, as well.
Some of the academic data itself, for example, such as the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) test, can be somewhat unreliable in some ways.
“The FSA is not supported all that well in some schools throughout the province, so the reliability of that (data) always gets put into question because of the politicization of that particular instrument,” Longridge told the board last week in delivering his report. “It’s one of those pieces of data that we use and we’d like to continue to use, but we have to take if for what it is, which is that it’s problematic to a degree, but we still feel there’s some utility to that data.”
There’s also the problem that many educational improvement factors can’t be quantified with numbers and charts.
“When you talk about the things that our students are able to do, a lot of it you just can’t add up,” Longridge says. “You can’t make it into graphs and charts. You can’t replicate it numerically, and yet that’s how we have to distill things down into a report.
“We want to get better at measuring what you should be measuring, not just what you can measure,” Longridge continues. “When you see what kids are actually learning and how capable they are, it’s not always represented in the data we’re able to collect.”
And while he says they have made great progress in addressing mental health needs and education within the district, there is still room to grow in that area, as well.
“We’re doing a lot more work with our community partners in regard to mental health, mental health literacy and other supports through organizations like Family Services, the Ministry of Children and Families and the John Howard Society,” Longridge says, “and I’m sure we’ll see even more of that as they develop the hub downtown that will be a coordinated support mechanism for students within the community around mental health.”
The entire 2016 Superintendent’s Report can be viewed here. (PDF)