MSS is abandoning its attendance goal for the 2015-16 school year in favour of a school-wide social emotional learning program.
“The [school] district’s put out these five pillars of social emotional learning they’d like all schools to be working at — things like self-regulation, self-management, self-awareness,” MSS principal Bill Lawrence told the Herald.
The plan is to have all home room teachers teach eight lessons per year on these topics at each grade level, beginning in the fall.
“We can’t assume that every kid knows that stuff,” Lawrence said.
The program MSS has will see students taught 40 lessons in social emotional learning over the course of their high school years starting with the graduating class of 2020.
Lawrence said this program will provide a more structured environment for teaching students about these skills.
He said aside from MSS’s Planning 10 class, teaching these skills came in a less structured form via career instruction at the Grade 8 and 9 level or through guest speakers.
After looking into attendance for the past two years, that goal has run its course in helping to determine what works and what doesn’t work in generating good attendance, Lawrence said.
He said the staff struggled with the incentive approach to increasing attendance.
“Should there be an incentive for doing the thing you’re supposed to do? So we didn’t really get that off the ground very far,” Lawence said.
MSS had a goal of reducing the percentage of students missing 16 days or more of school from 39 per cent to 30 per cent and achieved that goal by reducing that number to 21 per cent last year.
Lawrence said poor attendance continues to be an issue at MSS, typically amongst students in the senior grades.
Lawrence said looking into social and emotional learning may also help with attendance by teaching skills such as self-management.
