Inclusive Engagement

In the 2023-24 school year, Keewatin Patricia District School Board committed to working with Hannah Beach to provide consultation and practical strategies to support caregivers, staff in a time where students’ are experiencing high levels of anxiety in our schools. In May of 2024, centrally assigned staff as well as administrators across the system received an introductory session with Hannah Beach to explore and discuss the needs of our school communities and build a plan for the 2024-2025 school year.

Hannah is the author of “Reclaiming our students: Why Children Are More Anxious, Aggressive, and Shut Down Than Ever- And What We Can Do About It”. Hannah’s sessions can be accessed virtually or in person and are focused in the Kenora, Sioux Lookout, Dryden and Red Lake areas. In these sessions, Hannah will talk a lot about bridging and collecting students in a way that builds authentic connection between the caregivers, staff members and the students. Some of the topics that Hannah will work through this current school year with families and caregivers are looking deeply at aggression, resistance, bossiness, anxiety and unpacking what’s behind the behavior and how to help students move through these behaviors. Hannah’s approach is multilayered in that it recognizes the importance of developing self-advocacy while supporting a better understanding of navigating child dependency on parent advocacy. Hannah also supports an understanding for staff members on how to create space for student voice and student advocacy in the classroom. Hannah also talks a lot about bystander burnout and compassion fatigue understanding that this work can be challenging at times. She also discusses how collecting, bridging and matchmaking can build a deeper sense of school culture and community when we do it well and shares practical strategies to support achieving this.

We have received some positive feedback from some attendees. A foster parent shared that this gives her a better understanding of a child with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and how Hannah’s analogies were amazing and informative. An employee from Firefly indicated that the real-life examples Hannah shares are very relevant and that she enjoyed her conversational style of presenting and felt that the content that Hannah presented was very relevant and relatable to her work. Another parent had shared that she had been doing a lot of research on her own about aggressiveness and anxiety and the link between the two in kids these days. She felt that Hannah’s presentation offered another perspective that added some clarity to her own research. She also shared that it reinforced her own practices and strategies that she uses at home with her own children, but she also feels that this presentation that Hannah had provided is one that all parents should see.

Hannah Beach’s sessions are planned to continue throughout the 2024-25 school year, and I look forward to sharing how this has impacted our support with caregivers and families, external agencies KPDSB works with as well as our school community staff members.

In March of 2024, Keewatin-Patricia District School Board hired an engagement lead to create and implement an attendance and engagement process in response to Policy Program Memorandum 171- which refers to Attendance Support Programs.

The attendance and engagement process is a multifaceted approach to prevention and intervention strategies. There are three tiers in our process: universal prevention, early intervention, and intensive intervention.

The attendance and engagement initiatives for the 2024-25 school year live within Tier 1 focusing on universal prevention of school absenteeism while including strategies to support students. The Tier 1 interventions are geared towards enhancing positive school climate, safety, physical and mental health, social emotional learning and parental/ guardian/ caregiver involvement. Included within this framework are efforts to recognize and support early warning signs of absenteeism, refusal to attend behaviors, and supporting classroom engagement.

Our expectations for this initiative is that we recognize it will take time however we expect that within this time to have all schools in our board utilize the components of the tier one process that support their students and staff. Our hope is that school staff will influence a culture of proactive means while educating and engaging students while making their educational experience enjoyable. We also hope that this creates a culture of attendance that supports students to get to school, connect and engage, and take what they have learned into their everyday lives. When implemented we expect to see an increase overall in student attendance, awareness, and support barriers to educational success and overall well-being. We hope to continue to empower staff and students while supporting their voice.

To better understand the needs of our system we have selected 3 focus schools to directly support: Sioux North, Sioux Mountain and Open Roads. These schools were selected based on current attendance rates and the need for support while Open Roads was selected based on their school’s opportunities and programs they provide for their students along with their attendance needs and diverse staff experiences.

The supports for our focus schools include providing 1 to 1 support, programs, initiatives, designed for the individual school and their demographics; supporting administration and staff in classrooms with specific cases, classes, lessons; providing updated attendance data through encompass and student tracker groups; guide the supervised alternative learning process for secondary schools when cases arise; hands on with the attendance matters campaign; directly supporting the removal of barriers and implementing alternate options.

Some of the feedback we have already received from staff members is a recognition that this is going to take time, and they foresee three years to see a significant shift in attendance rates; the process seems easy enough to follow and we have definitely been implementing it; we need to be creative in thinking about transportation to get students to and from school.

We are excited to see the progress in implementing the Attendance and Engagement Strategy throughout the school year and look forward to sharing the growth of our attendance and engagement process in our next report.

The Human Rights and Equity team has been directly involved with the board’s attendance and engagement strategy, a learning partnership with the Education Equity and Governance Secretariat, working alongside student advisory groups representing multiple communities in our board, developing training sessions for staff around human rights, gender equity, and anti-Indigenous racism as well as addressing reports of violations of Human Rights.

The Education Equity and Governance Secretariat from the Ministry of Education invited our school board to participate in learning centered on interrupting systemic racism. During the 2023-24 school year, members of our senior team including our director began a journey in building a solid foundation for our own learning in anti-oppressive practices. There are four school boards involved in the learning. Each school board then presented options for communities of practice to turn our learning into action. Our school board is committed to all three communities of practice: looking at hiring practices and interrogating how bias can impact who we hire and looking at how to interrupt and shift that practice, suspension rates and digging deeper into who is being suspended and the impacts of suspension on student achievement and investigating graduation rates and digging deeper into what barriers exist in our system that prevents students from graduating. We are looking forward to our continued work in these communities of practice and tracking the impact of our learning and actioning of our learning.

As the human rights and equity advisor, I have worked alongside the indigenous education lead to create student advisory groups. These groups have been accessed and leveraged to ensure that student voice is incorporated in everything that I lead. The school climate surveys were vetted through these student advisory groups. The students had an opportunity to give me feedback to bring back to the team and we incorporated 95% of student feedback in the surveys. I continue to lead through example by centering student voice in all of the work that I do. Some of the feedback from the students in this process was a sincere appreciation of being included because they always felt that the school climate surveys were written by adults for adults and by having them review the surveys, it provided them with the opportunity to provide clear language that was accessible to students.

Another aspect of my role includes training staff members in areas that are important for student achievement. I attended several student group sessions in our high schools and was invited to listen. It afforded me the opportunity to see the needs of training for our staff as a system and last year our administration and senior team completed a course called “Gender Inclusive Classrooms” to support their learning. We had a completion rate of 75% for this course and I will continue to follow up with staff members to ensure we have a 100% completion rate. We also began training sessions on anti-Indigenous racism and we have now added these to our human resources downloads making them mandatory for all new staff to KPDSB.

With the launch of our new board website this current school year, there will be an opportunity for board staff, students, and families to report directly to me regarding human rights. This is a duty of my role in this board, and I believe by supporting in this capacity of addressing human rights, it will guide my work forward so we will better support our students, our staff and our families in achieving academic and student success. There will be more to come on this in the new year.

I am looking forward to continuing growing my role as the human rights and equity advisor and most importantly modelling centering student voice and families to continue to guide my work.