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Caroline Plante
The Canadian Press
The students will receive a first report card and, if the trend continues, a third of them will fail.
The year 2020 ends with a staggering statistic: the failure rate of high school students is three to five times higher than at the same date last year, or from 30% to 50%, depending on the region.
Faced with this reality a month ago, the Minister of Education, Jean-François Roberge, said he would wait for the first bulletin to have a clearer picture.
On December 3, he swept aside a proposal from the PQ education spokesperson, Véronique Hivon, to quickly offer students a mentoring program.
“We have to wait for the upcoming bulletin before making any decisions,” Mr. Roberge told the Blue Room, who declined an interview request from The Canadian Press.
“We must not make a decision that is hasty”, added the minister, saying he wanted to “see if the students really use the time they have been given (before the first report) to catch up”.
The oppositions accuse the minister of having always been “two steps late”; Mr. Roberge retorts that the school service centers have always had the necessary funds to help their students.
A year like no other
The daily lives of tens of thousands of students were turned upside down on March 13, when the government closed schools due to the spread of COVID-19.
What was supposed to be a two-week break (a vacation for students, the minister said) has turned in some areas into a four-month shutdown.
If we take the summer break into account, schools in Montreal were closed for half the year; the problems of learning, motivation, mental health in the pupils increased.
The great success of 2020 is undoubtedly the reopening of schools in September, trumpeted Mr. Roberge, who failed to explain that sports tournaments and extracurricular activities would be shelved.
To ensure the protection of all, we have imposed health measures: bubble classes, through the wearing of the compulsory mask in secondary school and alternating school for the oldest.
But the coronavirus is still invited to schools. As of mid-December, 40% of them had cases of COVID-19. More than 1,500 classes across the province were closed.
Has for absent
All of this was predictable, and perhaps preventable, say opposition MPs and labor organizations who were invited by The Canadian Press to take stock of the year in education.
They accuse Minister Roberge of having ignored several of their proposals, including those to act in the summer to guarantee good air quality in schools and to train half-classes in secondary.
They also asked to facilitate catching up by prioritizing essential content, canceling ministerial tests and reducing the weighting of the first report, which is equal to 50% of the final mark.
“It is not because it does not bleed that it is not urgent to act”, summarizes in interview Mme Hivon, who fears that we are creating a “COVID generation” whose problems will continue to increase.
Liberal Marwah Rizqy gives the minister an “A” for “absent”, her big mistake having been to have planned the year 2020-2021 as a “normal” year, adds Christine Labrie, of Quebec solidaire.
We must therefore expect a first “disastrous” bulletin in January, we continue in the union ranks, unless we ask teachers to “fiddle with the notes” to make the picture more pleasant.
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