Photo SARAH MONGEAU-BIRKETT, La Presse archives
“The Québec Ombudsman’s report on the services offered to elementary school students with adjustment or learning difficulties is both worrying and heartbreaking,” wrote our editorialist.
If we judge a society by the way it treats the most vulnerable, the verdict rendered Monday by the Québec Ombudsman is not very flattering for Quebec.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
His report, about the services offered to elementary school students with social maladjustments or learning difficulties, is both worrying and heartbreaking.
Worrying because the services offered to these vulnerable young people are “according to what is possible”. Yet they should be “as necessary”.
From this failure comes another.
These young people “are not making the expected progress and their delays persist, hampering their academic career and their personal and social development”, observes the ombudsman, Marc-André Dowd.
The report is also heartbreaking because the problems faced by vulnerable children and their families, who urgently need the services offered by remedial teachers, speech therapists, psychoeducators, psychologists, etc.
We know that there are too few of these professionals in the public school network. And it is difficult to find reinforcements at the same time because the working conditions and salaries of these specialists are no longer advantageous enough.
We also know that services are not systematically offered based on student needs, but rather according to the amounts made available to service centers and schools. Amounts that too often remain insufficient.
“They say that you have to intervene according to the needs of the students, but in my daily life, that’s not true. I am asked to put out fires and to scatter the service to give it to as many people as possible, ”said one of the professionals who testified in the context of the investigation.
Finally, we know that the administrative tasks of professionals are so heavy — particularly with regard to the evaluation of these students in difficulty — that they significantly encroach on the time that could be devoted to providing services.
The Minister of Education, Jean-François Roberge, had also promised to remedy this problem. But that’s obviously easier said than done.
Two years of pandemic have turned priorities upside down, of course. Still, COVID-19 sometimes has a broad back.
The Ministry of Education is far from having been exemplary.
It does not even have a clear portrait yet of what is happening in the network across Quebec with regard to the vacant professional positions that must be filled for an adequate service offer. Nor does he know the delays between the moment when it is recognized that a student needs help and the moment when he obtains services.
It’s no wonder a ministry hits a wall when it struggles to see the paths open to it.
Fortunately, as soon as he is ready to set his eyes on the road, he will be able to use the procedure proposed by the Québec Ombudsman, as well as the many recommendations made over the years by all those who have the well-being of vulnerable young people. The Higher Council for Education and the Commission for Human Rights and Youth Rights are among them.
Not to mention the Federation of Education Professionals of Quebec. In particular, at the beginning of the year, she suggested the creation of multidisciplinary teams in order to “distribute support, act in prevention and create an effective work dynamic to meet the needs of the communities”. A similar recommendation is at the heart of the Québec Ombudsman’s report.
In summary, there is an urgent need to review both the service funding model and its organization.
This is a major challenge and the person who will hold the position of Minister of Education in the next government would do well to make it a priority. The fate of children with adjustment or learning difficulties depends on it.