As B.C. students head to class this week – many kindergartners for the first time – a new report highlights many simply aren’t ready for school due to a lack of literacy.
The number of “vulnerable learners” in Surrey, B.C.’s biggest school district, is rising and libraries, schools and social agencies are scrambling to keep up.
These kids are often from immigrant families who speak English as a second language.
A new literacy report from Surrey Libraries states that three-quarters of residents under age 14 who immigrated to B.C. have no knowledge of English upon their arrival, setting them up for challenges in school.
Those struggles start early: At least a third of Surrey kindergartners start school labelled vulnerable learners, a figure that has grown from 28 to 32 per cent in recent years, according to the latest data from the University of B.C.’s Human Early Learning Partnership, which is cited in the library report.
Twenty-six of Surrey’s 48 neighbourhoods had vulnerability rates of over 35 per cent and the community of Kennedy Trail saw rates over 54 per cent.”Why, when there is all this work being done, are we still seeing vulnerability, and increased vulnerability at that?” asked Surrey’s chief librarian, Melanie Houlden. She surmised that Surrey’s fast-growing population – the city estimates 1,000 new residents move to the area each month – and attractiveness to immigrants and less-expensive housing, are factors in the number of kids needing extra support with literacy.
“Every agency, the libraries, the school district, the recreation centres are struggling to keep up with the growth in the city,” she said. For their part, Surrey Libraries helped 122,000 kids under age five in preschool literacy pro-grams and another 14,000 schoolchildren in summer reading clubs.
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They also had 2,800 parents and children attend the Storytimes to Help Learn English program.
Since the new City Centre Library opened last year, there has been an 11-per-cent rise in memberships. Sara Grant, City Centre Library manager of children’s and teen services, said libraries are becoming more like social-service centres than simply book repositories.
“There are good resources here, not just picture books and story times, but everything that would help a vulnerable family – job clubs, tax advice, contacts for parenting work-shops, translation services, even finding housing. We are a gateway to information for the community. We’re a hub for resources and referrals.”
Library representatives also go into the community, to food banks, immigrant and cultural agencies, schools, health units and Strong-Start programs to try to connect with families, she said.
At the municipal level, the city partnered with IBM consultants in June as part of its Child and Youth Friendly City Strategy to evaluate the region’s childhood development needs – a crucial undertaking in a city with 70,000 students where a third of the population is under age 19.
The city is now implementing those recommendations, according to the mayor’s office.But the problem of vulnerable learners isn’t limited to Surrey.
“The stress of work/home life, the cost of living are having a big effect,” Hertzman said. “Although there is increasing public resources, such as full-day kindergarten and Strong-Start, we are not yet on par with Europe,” he said.
He pointed out that although government has invested more, until we start spending on early childhood education the way Europeans do – at one to 1½ per cent of GDP, versus our 0.5 per cent – we’ll continue to fail these kids.Child-vulnerability rates across B.C. vary widely, though Hertzman said, “the trends of Surrey are pretty typical of the province as a whole.”
Vancouver’s child-vulnerability rate is 40 per cent, up from 37 per cent a few years ago, with levels of 59 per cent in Strathcona. Fourteen of Vancouver’s 23 neighbourhoods had rates over 35 per cent.
Prince Rupert’s rate was one of the highest at 49 per cent; Chilliwack and Nanaimo had rates of 34 per cent; Richmond, Burnaby and Quesnel had rates of 32 per cent; Victoria’s was 30 per cent; Kamloops and Langley had rates of 29 per cent; New Westminster’s was 28 per cent; the Central Okanagan was at 23 per cent; and Revelstoke saw just seven per cent.
The B.C. government made a goal of reducing childhood vulnerability to 15 per cent by 2015, but to date, only five per cent of all neighbourhoods in B.C. had rates below that figure, according to HELP.
The Ministry of Education stressed it’s working on the issue and pointed to its funding of a number of programs that reach early learners and vulnerable students across the province.Full-day kindergarten, implemented in September 2011, now sees 37,000 students enrolled.
There are 326 StrongStart programs in B.C. serving preschool children, supported by $10 million in yearly funding.The Ready, Set, Learn kindergarten readiness program for three-year-olds, now in its ninth year, gets $2.75 million per year.And this year the government announced another $10.7 million to support student reading programs.Surrey’s school district is getting $1.35 million of the reading-program funding, plus another $3.8 million in Community LINK (Learning Includes Nutrition and Knowledge) funding for things such as breakfast programs and counsellors and another $3.2 million vulnerable-student supplement.
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