The Kootenay Lake school district has released a breakdown of six-year completion rates at its Nelson high school, after figures from the Ministry of Education released late last year showed slumping rates around SD8.
According to ministry figures, about 74 per cent of SD8 students received a Dogwood diploma within six years of starting Grade 8.
But director of student learning Andy Leathwood says staff have looked into the 56 students identified as non-completers at L.V. Rogers and found the numbers don’t reflect reality.
“The vast majority of students were actually students who were on international or national exchanges,” he says.
“If a student, for example, came on a Quebec exchange in Grade 11 and they were sitting in a seat on September 30, then left and went back to their own school they’re counted as a non-completer.”
Of the 56 students, Leathwood says 12 were “true non-completers” who “dropped out of school or failed courses and couldn’t meet our grade requirements.”
In addition to exchange students, it appears the Nelson Junior Leafs also had a hand in skewing the district’s completion score. Leathwood says out-of-province hockey players who enroll at LVR, but leave at the end of the season, are also considered non-completers.
While the ministry does tweak its numbers to allow for some out-migration in high school, Leathwood says it doesn’t consider many of the factors, such as hockey, that can keep teens moving in and out of rural communities. Nelson’s numbers also hold true at other large SD8 high schools — at Creston’s Prince Charles Secondary School they were virtually identical.
Leathwood says several factors kept the dozen true non-completers from graduating from LVR in the allotted six years.
While family issues and what Leathwood calls “individual social factors,” such as drug use or trouble with the law were sometimes involved, “the biggest trend seems to be kids who’ve struggled for whatever reason with... making the transition from elementary school to high school, and kids who struggled making the transition from outside our system into our system.”