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Ontario Principals’ Council says schools need clarity on which absences can be excused after Education Minister Paul Calandra’s latest comments on the province’s new rules, which link high school students’ attendance and participation to their final grades.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
As the school year begins in Ontario, a new policy linking high school students’ attendance to grades has been thrown into confusion for principals across the province following comments made by Education Minister Paul Calandra on Tuesday.
Starting this school year, attendance and participation will count for 15 per cent of the final mark for students in Grades 9 and 10, and 10 per cent for those in Grades 11 and 12.
The government announced the change in April, as part of an effort to tackle high absentee rates.
Many parents wondered what the new policy would mean for their children’s grades in cases in which they need to take them out of class for sports or for other reasons.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail in June, Mr. Calandra said those parents have nothing to worry about. Students who are absent from school because of hockey tournaments, other extracurricular activities or even family vacations will not see their grades docked so long as parents notify the school, he said.
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At a press conference in Hamilton on Tuesday, when asked by The Globe about the new policy, Mr. Calandra said: “Look, parents still have the ability to excuse their children. They’ll have to inform the school, the principal, that it is their intention to excuse their child.”
But in a follow-up answer, the minister seemed to suggest that the decision as to which absences count as excused or not will rest on principals’ discretion.
This came as a surprise to the Ontario Principals’ Council, which was not consulted on any parts of the policy, said president Amy Johnson.
“It starts the school year with uncertainty and instability,” she said on Tuesday. Some school boards’ classes started today. High school started today. So on the course outlines going out today, if anyone who watched the news was like, ‘So how does the attendance thing work?’ people don’t know, or else they’re answering in a vacuum. Certainly, as an organization, we haven’t gotten enough clarity ourselves to put something out to all of our members at this point.”
Mr. Calandra’s office did not respond to a request from The Globe on Tuesday when asked to clarify his remarks.
Principals will almost always allow students to participate in sports or go on family vacations without penalty, Ms. Johnson said.
“We do that as a matter of course,” she said.
“The problem now is that we don’t have clarity on all of the answers to the complex other ways that attendance plays out in schools,” she added. “We’re asking those questions right now of the ministry because all of those haven’t been spelled out in the policy.”
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Leaving these decisions to the discretion of principals without more clarity will not only add to principals’ workload but create more conflict between parents and administrators, said Kelly Gallagher-Mackay, an associate professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and the co-director of the Annual Canadian School Survey, a national initiative launched by People for Education and the Centre for Leading Research in Education.
This year’s inaugural survey of more than 450 principals across the country found only one-quarter said they had never had in-person interactions with parents or guardians that involved physical violence, threats or intimidation.
More than a third of principals reported being the subject of, or receiving, threatening or intimidating messages from parents or guardians by phone, e-mail or social media at least once or twice a month.
“The potential for that to flare up is for sure there,” Ms. Johnson said. “Principals, the vice-principals, we’re there to support students and their families, not be distracted by, frankly, arguing with them or delivering bad news that we hadn’t had clarity on in the first place.”
The policy is intended to target students who aren’t in class because they are “just deciding not to go to school,” Mr. Calandra said in June.
Attendance rates in the province are so poor that something had to be done to get students back at their desks on a more regular basis, he added. In previous years, attendance did not factor into grades.
The government expects students to be at school 90 per cent of the time, otherwise they are considered to be chronically absent.
However, only about a quarter of Grade 12 students and less than 34 per cent of those in Grade 11 are meeting the threshold of 90-per-cent attendance. Among students in Grades 9 and 10, 43 and 36 per cent, respectively, are meeting it.