(Montreal) As the new school year approaches, homeschooling families feel they do not have access to the resources and services to which they are entitled, an issue that will be addressed at an annual conference on September 7 at Collège Jean-Eudes in Montreal.
The Quebec Association for Home Education (AQED), a non-profit organization that provides support to families who homeschool their children in Quebec, says families are unable to obtain resources and services through school service centres.
In Quebec, the Regulation on homeschooling, resulting from the Education Act, provides a framework for educational families and determines certain conditions and procedures that must be met for a child to be educated in this way.
The relatively recent regulation also provides for the support and supervision that school boards and school service centres (CSS) must provide to these children.
However, according to recent surveys conducted by the AQED among its members, more than a third of the 196 families who responded confirmed that they had been refused at least one service guaranteed by law. More than a third of families also stated that the burden of the procedures to access a service discouraged them.
The AQED maintains that it finds itself between two stools, having to report to the Ministry of Education, but having to approach the CSS for services.
“Even though the CSS are subsidized by the government to offer these services, the families-educators face aberrant and unacceptable situations by not receiving the services to which they are entitled,” mentions the organization.
“We are still in a kind of three-way system,” laments AQED public relations manager Émilie Salesse Gauthier. The organization claims to have sent access to information requests to all CSSs to try to understand how the money they receive to support homeschooled children is distributed. “We are told that the (CSSs) have money for us, but what did they do with that money?” asks M.me Salesse Gauthier: Why don’t we put this money somewhere where families need it?
“The idea with the regulation was to remove this dynamic, to remove different ways of doing things through the CSS. […] “We were had all along the line,” she laments, before adding that this issue will be the subject of an information point at the start of the congress on September 7.
The congress is an opportunity for family educators to meet and find a wealth of information for home education.
The AQED maintains that since the Coalition avenir Québec came to power, collaboration with the government has been more difficult. “We have not been listened to,” adds Mme Salesse Gauthier: There is no openness to working together to try to find solutions.
The AQED says it has made repeated requests for a meeting with Education Minister Bernard Drainville for two years, but without success. The Education Ministry did not respond to a request for comment from The Canadian Press sent Wednesday.
Back to normal after COVID-19
The number of children being homeschooled is back to normal in Quebec after record years marked by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As of August 14, 2024, there were 6,002 children reported to be homeschooled, according to figures from the Department of Education. At the height of the pandemic, nearly double the number of children were homeschooled, with 11,947 in 2020-21 and 11,379 in 2021-22.
For Émilie Salesse Gauthier, the fear of disease transmission, the difficulty for parents to juggle school requirements during confinement – such as distance learning for several children in the same household – and issues of inadequate services may have motivated a greater number of families to take the leap.