The New Brunswick government unveiled its new 12-year plan for the francophone and anglophone school systems Monday and confirmed it’s looking at introducing pre-kindergarten in the next few years.
The plans have several goals, but Education Minister Claire Johnson says the major focus is on improving the province’s poor literacy and numeracy scores in addition to student well-being.
“We’re going to be providing those targeted investments in educational assistants and resource teachers to make sure that they have around them the resources they need to meet targets in literacy and numeracy,” she said.
She adds the province will be hiring 200 more educational assistants across the province.
Premier Susan Holt says there needs to be protected time for students to meet minimum targets for fundamentals, which means fewer field trips and presentations, for example.
The plans also include moving toward adding a year to the school system for students prior to starting kindergarten.
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“We’re really interested in moving toward having the resources, both physical, the infrastructure and space and the resources in terms of teachers and early learning specialists in order to move to that four-year-old, pre-kindergarten, whatever you want to call it,” said Holt.
Holt says it would take at least three years to stabilize the school systems before adding a new grade level.
The plan will be re-evaluated every three years with annual reporting from schools. New Brunswick last released its education plans in 2016.
The French-language public school network’s plan had a component about teaching students to have pride in their francophone identity.
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And both plans mention teaching students and staff ethical and effective use of AI tools, as well as monitoring the “impact of digital tools and AI on learning and accessibility.”
When asked by reporters, Holt and Johnson did not have specifics on how AI would be integrated in the classroom.
There have been calls recently for New Brunswick to bring in a social media ban for young people and to reconsider its inclusion of AI chatbots in its curriculum.
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