The elephant in the classroom | The Press

Close your eyes and imagine for a moment that a public school class in Quebec is an alpine ski lesson.

In his group, the teacher has children who are incapable of snowplowing as well as little champions who want to do moguls. He also has a child on the autism spectrum, another with a physical disability, a young person with a serious behavioral disorder, another who has just arrived in Quebec and does not speak the language…

With such a heterogeneous group, slip-ups are guaranteed. No one will benefit, which will push the discouraged professor to hang up his coat.

Now let’s return to the school network, where the number of students in difficulty has exploded from 103,000 in 2000 to 258,000 today.

At the same time, Quebec emptied specialized classes to integrate young people in difficulty into regular classes, pursuing a laudable objective of equity and social integration. However, specialized resources (psychologists, remedial teachers, speech therapists) have not followed suit. And teachers find themselves with an impossible load.

How do you expect a teacher to manage with 20 students who have specialized intervention plans in a class of 34 young people aged 4^e secondary? Despite all his efforts, all his passion, around fifteen failed in the first ballot.

Let’s ask ourselves: are we doing our children a favor by putting them all together in the same boat? Children who are doing well remain hungry. Those who struggle do not get the support they want.

As proof, only 29% of parents of students with a difficulty code say they are satisfied with the measures put in place to support their child, according to a survey by the Federation of Parents’ Committees of Quebec.

And inclusion at all costs is slowly killing teachers who are not trained to deal with so many different cases. Some feel like they are in the hospital, in the middle of a pandemic, and having to choose who to give the ventilator to.

The integration of students in difficulty is the elephant in the classroom. This is the real issue that is undermining the education system. And this is also the crux of current negotiations with teachers.

It is time to review our school adaptation policy. But how ?

Reduce teacher-student ratios by taking better account of students in difficulty?

Provide more specialized help to support teachers?

In a context of labor shortage, it would be more realistic to create more specialized classes for young people in difficulty, in order to avoid dispersing scarce resources across the network.

In fact, we could promote inclusion in the school, but specialization in the class. Thus, all students would have access to the same extracurricular, sporting and cultural activities. But they would be grouped into small classes for some courses, and others not, using a modular approach.

This model would promote diversity, while optimizing learning according to the needs of each individual.

Centralizing help is the best way to lighten the workload of teachers, while still offering young people the necessary help.

Private schools must also be part of the solution. But it is too easy to put all the blame on them, accusing them of skimming the public network of the best students. In reality, public schools do not fare any better in areas where there are no private schools.

The fact remains that private schools must do more to integrate young people in difficulty. Currently, disabled students and students with social maladjustments or learning difficulties (EHDAA) represent 17% of their students, compared to 24% on the public side.

If we want private schools to offer adequate services, Quebec must provide them with specific funding for EHDAA students, which is not the case at the moment.

Already, mentalities are changing. Nearly 90% of students who enter private education complete their secondary education there, compared to only 70% at the start of the 2000s, estimates the Federation of Private Educational Establishments.

So much the better, because it is unacceptable for private schools to abandon young people who have behavioral problems or who are struggling to follow the program along the way. Instead of taking responsibility, they dump the problem onto the public who must accept all students.

They accepted these young people, may they accompany them to the end!

The important thing is that young people in difficulty really have services wherever they are. Please, let’s avoid adding new codes that determine funding for students in difficulty, an envelope of 3.4 billion per year, which can lead to overdiagnoses.

All these diagnoses monopolize the experts who are so lacking and cost thousands of dollars for parents who very often have to resort to private services, which creates an unhealthy two-tier system.

First and foremost, young people need help, not a label.