Graduates from a high school in the Laurentians were deprived of a qualified French teacher for five months. Their management asks CEGEPs to take this particular situation into account so that students who want to enroll in quota programs are not penalized.
Since the beginning of the school year, three of the four French groups of Secondary V at the Curé-Mercure school in Mont-Tremblant have been “accompanied by a substitute without receiving adequate teaching on a regular basis”, can we read in a letter addressed to the Regional Admissions Service of Metropolitan Montreal (SRAM), of which The newspaper got a copy. SRAM oversees admission applications to 32 college institutions in the province.
The secondary school administration asks SRAM to take this particular situation into account when analyzing the admission requests of these students. “We therefore ask you to take a look at the fourth secondary transcript as a priority”, writes the management team, which specifies that a qualified French teacher has now been in post since January 26.
“We will do everything in our power to recover the accumulated delay and regularize the situation,” it added.
Parents of students who hope to be accepted into quota programs at CEGEP deplore the situation.
“It’s really worrying, the students really feel like they’ve been penalized and wonder how they’re going to be able to catch up,” said a mother who refused to name herself to prevent her child from being identified.
left to themselves
According to the testimonies collected, the students were left to their own devices and had to complete pages in an exercise book. A qualified teacher came to class on occasion to explain a few notions to them.
For its part, the Center de services scolaire des Laurentides recognizes that this is a “worrying situation” and ensures that it has been “taken seriously”.
In this school, the success rate in Secondary V French is down in the first stage (86.4% compared to 92.7% last year), but the situation “is not catastrophic”, says the communications coordinator, Sarah Richer.
Several efforts have been made to mitigate the impact of this situation on students, she says. Many members of the school team have mobilized to support the substitute and additional measures have been put in place to support graduates.
“The students weren’t left on their own,” she says.
School principals occasionally send such letters to explain particular situations, in the case of a serious illness or a death that would have had an impact on a student’s results, for example. , we say to SRAM.
The evaluation is then made on a case-by-case basis, in each of the CEGEPs, we add.