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Graduation rates down in Calgary, below provincial average after pandemic disruptions: CBE

The Calgary Board of Education said there is "work to do" in terms of supporting its Indigenous learners, who continue to post graduation rates significantly below the provincial average

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Calgary public school students continue to perform below provincial averages in graduation rates, with gaps growing even wider among English language learners and Indigenous kids since the pandemic.

According to an academic results report presented to the Calgary Board of Education on Tuesday, students who self-identity as Indigenous are still suffering the lowest graduation rates.

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Only 48.8 per cent of Indigenous students graduated within three years of high school education in 2021-22, compared to 59.5 per cent of Indigenous learners provincewide. And only 50.7 per cent graduated within five years, compared to 68 per cent of Indigenous students provincewide.

That gap between CBE and Alberta averages has widened since the pandemic — particularly in the five-year completion rate, which saw 53.1 per cent of Indigenous students graduating in 2020-21 compared with 68.1 per cent of Indigenous learners provincewide, a difference of 17 per cent compared to the following year’s gap of 18.

Illness-related disruptions, unfilled sub positions among factors schools still contending with

CBE officials admitted Tuesday there is still much “work to do” in terms of supporting Indigenous learners, particularly after pandemic-related disruptions continue to affect unique students nearly three years after COVID began.

“The COVID pandemic continues to have ongoing impacts to learning for students in the 2021-22 school year,” said Joanne Pitman, CBE superintendent of school improvement.

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“Across CBE schools, teachers continue to contend with the impacts of previous academic years while also managing continued disruptions due to illness, unfilled sub positions and increased levels of student absenteeism.”

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At the same time, English language learners — students who don’t speak English as their first language at home — are also seeing lower graduation rates since the pandemic, and significantly lower averages than provincial rates.

In 2021-22, only 67.3 per cent of CBE English language learners graduated in three years, compared to 78.5 per cent provincewide. Meanwhile, 79.9 per cent graduated in five years, compared to 86.1 per cent provincewide.

Those gaps have also grown from the previous year, when 85 per cent of CBE English language learners graduated in five years during the 2020-21 school year, compared to 86.9 per cent provincewide — a gap of less than two per cent, well below last year’s eight per cent.

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Recovery might take ‘multiple years of support’

Still, some of last year’s results are showing improvements from years dated further back. For instance, in 2018-19, only 72 per cent of English language learners in the CBE graduated within four years, but by 2021-22 up to 80 per cent had graduated within the same time frame.

But Pitman warned, “while we are seeing progress in some areas . . . we also expect to see the impacts of those pandemic experiences for some time.”

Since COVID shuttered schools in March 2020, students have faced myriad disruptions, moving from online to in-person learning several times due to outbreaks and absenteeism among students and staff.

“Where we see declines in recovery,” Pitman added, “it may in fact require multiple years of support and targeted attention.”

Officials also said a growing number of high school students are taking more than the basic three years to graduate due to a number of challenges, including refugees arriving from wartorn countries, students facing serious mental-health challenges that affect attendance, or students simply needing to upgrade courses to meet increasingly difficult entry requirements for post-secondary programs.

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Results for elementary, junior high students see slight dip

The report also outlined academic results for elementary and junior high students, some of which also showed declines in academic performance since the pandemic.

Report card results for English language arts in junior high showed an average of 70.9 per cent in 2021-22, down slightly from the previous year of 71.5 per cent. Similar results were seen in math, where junior high students scored an average of 72.4 per cent in 2021-22, down from the previous year of 73.7.

Report card grades for elementary students — scored differently on a scale of 1 (not meeting grade level) to 4 (excellent) — showed some improvements in the earliest grades, rising from 2.94 to 2.96 in English language arts for kids in grades K-2 over the past two years, and bumping up slightly in math as well, from 3.01 to 3.10.

In late 2021, Alberta Education invested $45 million to address COVID learning loss for students in grades 1 to 3, providing funding to school boards to hire temporary teacher specialists for one-on-one or small group learning.

eferguson@postmedia.com

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