announced this week<\/a> would mean that participation and attendance will make up for 15 per cent of final marks for Grades 9 and 10, and 10 per cent in Grades 11 and 12.<\/p>\nEducation strategist, Dwayne Matthews told CTV\u2019s Your Morning this week that the three main reasons students miss have to do with mental health struggles, like anxiety and depression, financial instability at home, and bullying. <\/p>\n
He said while changes to the curriculum when it comes to attendance signals that there is a problem, it doesn\u2019t necessarily deal with the problem directly. <\/p>\n
\u201cMy hope would be that we really focus on dealing with those three things directly,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t have a problem with the signal itself… it sends a message to parents, to students, to the educators that there is a problem, because it\u2019s coming down from the ministry, but I think it\u2019s just the first of many steps.\u201d<\/p>\n
Matthews said he thinks the changes in attendance records will lead to motivated students to use it as an easy way to gain marks. <\/p>\n
Meanwhile, he thinks it won\u2019t supersede the challenges keeping the students struggling with bullying, mental health or financial instability at home.<\/p>\n
Matthews noted that 25 per cent of high school students report being bullied, either cyber or physical, one time per year, which amounts to 150,000 to 200,000 students a year that are experiencing some form of bullying.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think this is a canary and a coal mine to a much, much larger problem,\u201d Matthews said, adding that he hopes it starts a larger conversation. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think it is a much smaller piece to a much larger problem, and it would be my hope that the ministry is really, really focused on that larger problem,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
With files from the Canadian Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ontario proposes counting attendance toward final grades to improve engagement . Critics say students could be penalized for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":613967,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[712,49,48,44],"class_list":{"0":"post-613966","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-canada","8":"tag-apple-news","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/613967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}