(Quebec) Promised in 2020, the reform of the funding of services intended for students with disabilities or with social maladjustments or learning difficulties (EHDAA) will finally materialize at the start of the 2023 school year. Professionals in schools will then have less paperwork to complete and will be able to give more hours of services to children, according to the Ministry of Education.
Posted at 5:21 p.m.
Speech therapists, remedial teachers, psychoeducators and other professionals in schools have long complained about the burden of their administrative tasks. These tasks, such as “declaring the codes of difficulty” of the children, are currently necessary to calculate the funding that each school receives for services intended for special needs students.
In 2020, the Minister of Education Jean-François Roberge announced that certain administrative procedures would be eliminated and that the funding of services would be done on a historical basis, therefore according to the amounts allocated in the past. It promised a reform of the funding model within two years. The professionals however deplored that the lightening of the tasks did not really occur.
In a letter sent to school service centers on Thursday, and that The Press has obtained, the Deputy Minister of Education, Alain Sans Cartier, announces that “the difficulty code declaration process will be permanently withdrawn as of the 2023-2024 school year, since the difficulty codes will no longer be used in the calculation of funding.
A new funding model for services to EHDAA will be presented and tested in pilot projects during the next school year. It will come into force everywhere in 2023. Funding will now be based on socio-economic and demographic indicators, among others.
“It is estimated that at least 375,000 hours of work will be freed up for professionals in the school network as soon as the streamlining of administrative processes is put in place. This time will be reinvested to offer more complementary educational services to students,” says Alain Sans Cartier.
For 2022-2023, “the current budgetary measures will be renewed, thus ensuring the stability of funding”.