'One is too high': Manitoba, school divisions trying to track hundreds of unaccounted-for students
Education minister has told all divisions he wants to receive absentee numbers on a regular basis
Every day there are hundreds and sometimes thousands of students who aren't showing up for school, and divisions in Manitoba say they need to get them back in class.
Many other students have stopped going to school altogether and fallen off the radars of school divisions. It's a problem many have refused to acknowledge the depth of.
"This has been going on for years and it's kind of hidden in plain sight," Kent Dueck said. "The teachers know about it, fellow students know about it but no one has been willing to talk openly about it."
Dueck was part of the province's 14-person Attendance Task Force, which operated from 2019 to 2022.
"Each kid has their own story. A lot of times kids have just completely dropped out of society, almost, in general," Dueck said. "For a lot of kids they're going day by day and just trying to survive and get by."
While Dueck said some divisions are "ripping the Band-Aid off' and opening up the conversation about chronic absenteeism, many still won't talk about unaccounted-for students who've gone missing.
"It's a very, very big problem," he said.
Winnipeg School Division Superintendent Matt Henderson announced earlier this month that the division has plans to address 2,500 students struggling to attend classes regularly.
But there is another section of kids who aren't going at all.
Thousands of students 'unaccounted' for: report
In fall 2023, Manitoba Education and Early Childhood Learning began collecting information on students identified as experiencing severe chronic absenteeism, where unexcused absences account for 20 or more classes in a single high school course, or at least 20 per cent of instructional days in kindergarten to Grade 8 in a reporting period.
The province asked all school divisions in Manitoba to take a deep dive into their attendance records as part of their commitment to addressing the problem.
It came on the heels of significant enrolment decreases found around the province in September 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A 115-page report commissioned by the previous Conservative government found more than 6,500 students — nearly four per cent of Manitoba's K-12 population — went missing or were unaccounted for between the start of the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years.
It called on officials to take immediate action to find thousands of "inactive" learners — students who were previously enrolled in school, stopped attending and had not graduated or moved outside the province.
Current state of absenteeism
The provincial report found more than 3,100 students in the Winnipeg School Division were unaccounted for.
Henderson disputed the validity of that number. His team found it was closer to 800 students that were unaccounted for, 75 per cent of which the division was able to track down.
"I had my team cross reference this list of missing students to our current enrolment to say, 'Where are they,' " he said. "Many of those students have already graduated. Many of those students are in our schools
But that still meant roughly 200 students are missing and unaccounted for.
"That's significant. That's worrying," Henderson said. "I don't want to downplay that and just say, 'It's just that number.' I think anytime a child is not coming to school, that's an emergency."
He said the numbers aren't difficult to track "as long as you keep kids on the roster."
The division has made changes to try to better track students and Henderson said they no longer drop students from enrolment if they haven't been to school for a certain number of days.
"If a child is on your roster, they stay on your roster forever. Indefinitely — unless we find out they are in a different school or province," Henderson said. "Those are the investigations we are working diligently on."
Henderson said every school system in the country is struggling with attendance.
"I think it's a wake-up call for all systems. It's certainly a wake-up call for Winnipeg School Division," he said.
River East Transcona School Division has also struggled. During the pandemic, the division lost contact with 87 students, according to a spokesperson.
Since that time they have managed to track down 32. However, the status of the 55 others remains unknown. The division said some have turned 18 and no longer attend school, and they continue to reach out to the others.
The Louis Riel School Division said it lost contact with two students during the pandemic and a spokesperson said no new recent data has been collected.
Other divisions CBC reached out to refused to release information on how many students are unaccounted for.
Provide data on regular basis: minister
Education Minister Nello Altomare has told all divisions in the province that he and his office want to receive absentee numbers on a regular basis.
He said the onus of tracking the numbers falls on divisions and that there is a lot of work that needs to be done.
"We know the numbers are high. We know the numbers are problematic," Altomare said. "One is too high of a number in my opinion, and I know that sounds trite, but I can tell you when a kid isn't connected to school, it leads to poor outcomes later on in life," he said.
Altomare said he has received updated numbers for how many students are unaccounted for in the system since the 2022 report but would not share those numbers publicly.
"It doesn't matter if it's worse, better, if there are kids that are chronically absent, we have to support them," he said.
Eventually, he wants to get to a point where he can open his computer and see exactly who is in class.
"We have 288,000 kids in school," Altomare said. "I want to be able to see how many of them are actually there on that particular day."
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