Student attendance on the rise across troubled Northland school division

There are signs more students are going to class in the troubled Northland school division, which has been plagued for years by poor marks and low attendance.

Two schools now have attendance at 90 per cent or better, 11 schools at 85 per cent or better, said Colin Kelly, the official trustee of the division, which stretches across most of northern Alberta and serves 2,893 students.

In all, 15 of the 24 schools saw improvements, and overall attendance in the division increased by two per cent in the last school year.

Kelly updated provincial politicians at the public accounts committee on Tuesday.

He was there to report on the Northland division's progress following a March report by Alberta's auditor general, Merwan Saher. That report called for a series of actions to deal with what Saher described as an "unacceptably low" attendance record, with more than one-third of students in the district considered "chronically absent" from school.

The school district now has an attendance improvement initiative in place. All schools have attendance committees and are trying out incentive programs to reward kids who show up for school.

"In one of our schools, the students receive school money for attendance, and they can use that money to get prizes in the school store," said Donna Barrett, superintendent of the Northland school division. "So those kinds of things reach children."

There has also been a move to include more cultural programming for a region where there are large First Nations, Métis and Inuit populations.

"We have a number of schools, six or seven, involved in land-based education. Our students are out of the classroom on the land, partaking in cultural events that also teach the learning outcomes from our curriculum. We're finding our students are very engaged."

While the department of education acknowledged the division is working hard to reverse a decades-old problem, there is also an acceptance there socio-economic issues are creating barriers to education for some children.

"You might find, say for example, that they've been asked to stay at home to take care of younger siblings by their parents, because that's the only way that their parents can get out to work," said Lorna Rosen, the deputy minister.

There's also some mistrust of the system among many people in the region, in part because of an ugly history in education, including the fact that in the past children were taken away from their families and forced into residential schools.

While school board committees exist at the local level, many parents still don't feel a part of the process, because the main board of trustees was never replaced after it was dismissed in 2010.

All those issues demand a different approach after what Rosen describes as 60 years of failed attempts to improve things in the area's 24 schools.

"We have perhaps not been as pro-active as we might have been in the past about working collaboratively with the Northland school division to actually think outside the box and to say this is not a school division like every other school division in Alberta," Rosen said.

She told the committee a cross-ministry team, which will include the departments of human services and aboriginal affairs as well as Alberta education, will look at new ideas.

"This is a different effort for us. This is an effort I would suggest to you is as much about community building as it is about education."

The community building is already happening, as the division works with local media to try to spread the message that school is important.

The Northland district has set itself an attendance target of 95 per cent. There were questions from the committee about whether that's a realistic goal.

And while the division accepts it will take years to get there, it still thinks a five-per-cent increase is achievable in the schools that have struggled with the lowest attendance.

The auditor general will follow up on his initial report from March within the next three years.