(Quebec) The end of the catch-up plan put in place following the teachers’ strike compromises the continued deployment of more than 500 projects and initiatives that were created or improved to help students living with learning difficulties.
What you need to know
In the months following the end of the teachers’ strike last winter, Quebec implemented a catch-up plan to help vulnerable students.
The plan has notably enabled community organizations to improve or create more than 500 initiatives to help young people with learning difficulties.
However, the end of funding for this plan compromises the future of these projects, while the needs are still urgent. Stakeholders are demanding that certain measures become permanent.
However, even if the funding for these exceptional measures ends in the fall, the needs are still pressing, recalls Andrée Mayer-Périard, president of the Réseau québécois pour la réussite éducatif (RQRE), a few days before the start of the school year. In an interview with The Pressshe is reaching out to the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, and to Prime Minister François Legault to “start discussions now” to preserve the new services offered in recent months by community organizations and which, according to her, make a concrete difference in the lives of young people.
Last winter, the government announced investments of $300 million to fund a series of measures to address the negative effects of the strike on children during the remainder of the 2023-2024 school year and during the summer break. School service centres have since been authorized to spend the remaining funds in the weeks and first months following the current school year.
One of the measures funded by the catch-up plan made it possible to improve projects to help with academic success and to create new community initiatives to support children with learning difficulties.
For example, twice as many children from immigrant backgrounds benefited from sociolinguistic camps in order to continue their learning of French during the summer break, explains M.me Mayer-Périard.
A higher number of literacy interventions have also been deployed in municipal day camps, she continues, while organizations have provided more book bins and trained monitors so that they learn how to lead educational reading activities, among other things.
With the end of the funding provided for in the catch-up plan, these approximately 500 new enhanced projects or interventions would end. However, the RQRE president believes that “this is not the time to give up,” in a context where the effects of the teachers’ strike are added to the repercussions of the pandemic and the teacher shortage, which is hitting schools again this year.
Free and popular summer courses
While the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, will unveil this Friday a first statistical portrait of the shortage of qualified teachers in Quebec, voices are being raised once again to ensure that the flagship measures of the catch-up plan are made permanent.
One of these measures, funded to the tune of $36.6 million for the summer of 2024 alone, was to make summer school free for 4th grade students.e and 5e secondary for subjects covered by a ministerial test. In an interview with The Pressunions, school management, school service centres, parents’ committees and researchers have shown rare unanimity. They are all asking the Legault government to invest the necessary sums to ensure that this initiative is maintained. Québec solidaire (QS) also presented the same request last June.
“If a child has difficulty in December or February, in theory we will offer them services. Now, you arrive in June and to get through your year, you have to pay to take summer classes? There is something that is not working,” says Sylvain Martel, spokesperson for the Regroupement des comités de parents autonomes du Québec.
” [La gratuité des cours d’été] should stay. There are so many delays that need to be caught up… Our children are having difficulties. For some, it is playing out to the point of dropping out of school,” says the president of the Fédération des comités de parents du Québec, Mélanie Laviolette.
“We would like to keep summer school free. That’s kind of the spirit of the law. When we talk about free education in Quebec, it’s not just for the 180 days of school. It also includes summer school. But if we don’t have the budget to do it, schools won’t be able to afford it,” adds Nicolas Prévost, president of the Fédération québécoise des directions d’établissement d’enseignement (FQDE).
For school management, the flexibility of the catch-up plan, which allowed schools to add services according to the needs in each environment, is an approach that produces results.
“But flexibility costs money. If we take a teacher who has one task and ask them to add other tasks, it takes a certain amount of financial leeway to do so,” recalls the president of the Montreal Association of School Principals (AMDES), Kathleen Legault.
However, in a context where public finances are in the red, Mr. Drainville’s office refuses for the moment to commit to such a promise. “The catch-up plan was put in place exceptionally in order to minimize the impact of the strikes on students. We are already investing massively in measures for student success, particularly in terms of tutoring. […] “More than 100,000 students per year benefit from the program,” they say.