Why this Winnipeg teen stopped going to school — and how one organization got him back to class

For more than a year, Leland Moody didn't go to school. He stopped going to classes, stopped seeing his friends regularly and became somewhat of a recluse at home. 

"It started back in my first year of Grade 9," he said — a grade he ended up having to repeat. 

The now 17-year-old said he found out that due to a paperwork error, he wasn't actually registered at the Winnipeg school he was attending.

"Apparently I didn't have my registration form in. Once I handed it in they said I had to take a test, and that test was too long," he said. 

So instead, "I just gave up on going to that school," he said.

"And then I just stopped going to school for, like, months" — becoming one of thousands of students "unaccounted for" in Manitoba's education system. 

He would often stay up all night playing video games, either with friends or alone. He'd sleep all day. 

"I found out that, like, 'oh, this is more fun' — and so then I just started doing that more," Moody said. "[It] kind of became a habit."

For months, Moody said his parents had no idea he was staying home while they were at work. 

The longer he stayed away from school, the harder it was to try to go back. His anxiety grew. 

"My anxiety is basically, like, people are … going to judge me and all eyes are mainly going to be on me," he said. "I still have that anxiety."

It's taken more than two years to get him back full-time. He's now looking to complete Grade 10 this year.

It's kids like him that Inner City Youth Alive has helped get back into school. 

Thousands struggle to attend school

Inner City Youth Alive, a charitable organization that provides programming for low-income and at-risk youth in Winnipeg's North End, said the problem of chronically absent students is far greater than most people realize. 

Data collected by the organization, through the 800 children it works with, found that roughly 60 per cent of youth who disengage from school long-term were impossible to reach. 

The issue of absenteeism has led the province's largest school division to make changes.

Some students in Winnipeg School Division will either be starting classes an hour later or going home an hour earlier for one day each week, the division announced this month, as part of a pilot project intended to give staff more time to address high rates of absenteeism. 

It's a response to data that shows close to 2,500 students within the division, most of whom are in high school, are struggling to get to school.

Many are deemed severely chronically absent — meaning 20 or more unexcused absences in a single course for high school students, or a kindergarten to Grade 8 student who has missed 20 per cent or more of school days in a reporting period.

Those are kids who "currently are not in school and they have no will to even talk about school," said Sara Traver, a director with Inner City Youth Alive's Engage Education program, which works to address absenteeism and retention.

Many of the teens she works with are severely chronically absent. Most either aren't attending school at all or have "very, very irregular" attendance, she said — going to school at best only once a month, for a range of reasons.

There could be "addiction at home, poverty," she said. "They could be needing to take care of siblings."

Others struggle, fall behind and then drop out. 

"We have Grade 9s who are currently reading at a Grade 3 [level]," she said. "Then that turns into them not wanting to attend."

It's those "missing" students that divisions and the province are trying to track. 

A 115-page action plan for addressing chronic absenteeism, commissioned by Manitoba's previous Progressive Conservative government, was released in 2022.

It found about 6,500 students — nearly four per cent of Manitoba's K-12 population — were unaccounted for at the start of the 2020-21 school year, following the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic on education. 

The report stated 2,500 students had migrated to home-schooling that school year, but thousands of others remained unaccounted for, meaning they had been enrolled in school but no longer were, and had not graduated or transferred out of province.

Knocking on doors, driving kids to school

Those are the kids Traver is working to get back to class. 

Every day, she starts her morning by working through a list of 30 to 40 kids she is trying to motivate to go to school. Over the course of a school year, she has hundreds of kids she checks on.

"Every morning, minus 40 [degrees] or plus 30, we're out there trying to wake them up," she said. 

That means knocking on their doors and driving them to school. 

"I currently am trying to get a kid in school … who has not been to school in two years, and he is in Grade 8," said Traver.

Getting those kids back isn't easy, but she still tries. 

"It's hard sometimes — you know, it's like a slammed door in the face. [But] you don't want to give up on them," she said. 

There are successes. Sometimes it takes months of small steps to see notable progress.

Traver recalls working with an entire family of children who stopped going to school after the death of their older brother.

At first, they would attend for one hour every few days. Then they went a few days a week. When summer came, she needed to make sure they knew they weren't forgotten, even taking them out for ice cream.

Come September, they were back in school full-time with the help of her pickups.

She is happy to see some school divisions take a more serious approach to absenteeism, but said more needs to be done.

"It's a very real problem and it needs to have more than just one person, more than just one teacher, more than somebody knocking on a door," she said.

"You need the bigger agencies and teams to take a look at the problem and see how real it is."