Dojogirl has been bugging us to buy her a cell phone, for going on two years now. Pretty much every adult I know has one of these devices, and a good number of the teens now have one as well. Cell phones have gone from being an expensive item used mostly by adults who needed them for business, to a fairly affordable device without which most people over age 13 won’t leave home.

As cell phones have become more sophisticated we’ve seen increasing costs related to things like text messaging, and there is also the need to replace a phone frequently in order to keep up with the latest technology. Besides the question of whether we want to encourage our children to create this kind of negative environmental impact, there is also the financial burden which is generally borne by parents. Teens can easily fall into expensive usage patterns that they will later be unable to afford, rather than learning moderation with their first phones.

When we started seeing kids bring their phones to school a whole other can of worms: Students using cell phones to cheat during tests. Bullies using picture phones to take inappropriate photos in bathrooms and locker rooms - and subsequently distribute them so as to humiliate other young people. Teachers reporting that cell phone use was distracting their classes.

So it wasn’t surprising when schools banned cell phones. Some schools and districts simply banned their use during class time. But much of the inappropriate use can take place outside of class, and cell phones are now the item most often lost or stolen at school. It doesn’t take a genius to see why some districts have banned bringing cell phones to school altogether.

New York City is one place where all schools have banned cell phones completely. The move was made in 2005, and the issue is still being dragged through the courts. In April 2008 New York Supreme Court Justice Angela Mazzarelli ruled in favour of the ban, but it is likely this decision will be appealed by angry parents who feel their children need the phones with them at all times, in case of emergencies. In the meantime, students are apparently smuggling phones into school or paying bodega (that’s “dépanneur” for my Québecois readers) employees to “babysit” them - a practice which resulted in at least one case where the employee absconded with both the money and the phones…

I tell you, the debate just gives me one more reason to homeschool my kids - right through the high school years! My way of looking at the safety issue is this: if I can’t trust my children’s own behaviour, or if the world has become so unfriendly since I was their age, that I don’t want them to be out unsupervised then the best place for them is with their family. No cell phone is going to take care of them better than their parents can. In fact, that phone might just give us all a false sense of security.

I’d rather my kids were prepared for life in the world by a few more years of spending time with family, and being not only supervised but having the opportunity to discuss potentially risky situations and behaviours as the opportunities arise in daily life. This is something you will never get in a school group, whether private or public, because as soon as you’ve got one adult supervising more than 5 or so kids you’ve become institutionalized and you have to take special precautions to compensate for the fact that one adult really isn’t equipped to watch that many kids.

Schools have buddy systems, name tags or uniforms, younger kids holding onto ropes, checklists and travel by chartered bus, locked schools where kids are kept within the gates and walls, and even a parent with legitimate business must sign in and get a hall pass in order to gain access. While I do not at all deny these measures are important to the safety of such a large group of children in the care of a handful of adults, the fact is that this is not preparation for the real world. It might be preparation to be part of other institutions, but it isn’t going to do an adequate job of teaching anyone’s kids to behave on the street, in the library, at the park or the grocery store or the city hall - well, except in those instances when we need to stand quietly in a line or raise our hands and wait to be called upon before we speak.

Institutions tend to take both choice and responsibility away from anyone, young or old. Be it a school, a long term care hospital, a prison, etc. an institution involves a large group of clients and a significantly smaller group of staff. Routines and regulations are made chiefly with the goal of keeping order, with being fair and giving the same treatment to everyone - rather than with giving each client the things he or she needs. This kind of system can actually encourage abuses such as cheating, because the clients (like high school students) sense its rigidity and frequently feel they do not have a say in making the decisions that affect them on a daily basis. So while on the surface an institution is supposed to promote respect, order and ethical behaviour it is not unknown for it to also teach coping skills like lying, cheating and plagiarism to at least some of its clients - probably a large number if the rules and procedures are perceived as especially unfair.

I’ve rambled quite long on this one, but I just wanted to leave my readers with one last thought about school/public safety and cell phones. Many parents who felt that the cell phone ban was unconstitutional remarked that they wanted to know where their children were at all times, and they particularly mentioned concerns over school shootings and terrorist acts. Indeed, in some recent cases it was a call from a cell phone that was the first alert to 911. In the case of an event that knocks out school wide communications this could mean help would reach the school promptly. However, it is important to keep in mind that if every person in a school of 1000+ students got on their cell phone at the same time - whether to report the emergency to authorities, to communicate with parents or check on the safety of friends, or perhaps simply out of boredom during a lock down or evacuation - networks could easily be overwhelmed.

This is what happened after the fall 2006 shooting at Montreal’s Dawson College. I don’t think it made a very big difference to the delivery of emergency services in this case, as police happened to be already on the scene and were able to bring in all the required services by radio rather than cell phone. But I imagine that a number of families were disturbed when they couldn’t reach the students who were evacuated and needing help to get home. If there is one time when I do think we should fall back on institutions, it’s during an emergency. Especially in large cities with so many strangers to coordinate, the best equipped people to deal with communication and logistics are the emergency services providers. It’s something to think about…

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Maybe it’s just a slow news day or something, I don’t know. The morning news today made a big deal of announcing that Lester B Pearson School Board has just opened a new “state of the art” vocational training centre for anglophones. Much emphasis was placed on the fact that the two programs offered by the centre (electricity, and installation/repair of telecommunications equipment) are in such high demand that there is a two-year waiting list for them.

Oddly though, there was no mention of the “new” centre on the board’s own web site. Not on the front page of the web site, where we are instead told that an elementary school choir sang at Monday’s council meeting - and actually offered video of two songs they performed!

Not in the press release section, where the latest news is of the March 2008 resignation of the commissioner for Beaconsfield.

Not on the board’s adult and vocational education site, Pearson Skills. One page, which must not have been updated since early fall, states that the electrotechnology centre is under construction & is “due to open” in January 2008 (actually, the centre began accepting students as early as November 2007.)

Not on the pages that are actually dedicated to the Pearson Electrotechnology Centre (PEC.) Their latest news item is the beginning of evening classes in January!

What strikes me about all this (non?)news is that much emphasis is placed on how the centre is “state of the art” with “all new equipment” and it has been years in the making. The television news piece and the web site photo gallery both show a computer lab with sleek, black equipment - workstations with brand new keyboards and LCD monitors.

Now, I don’t know what kind of equipment is available in other elementary & secondary schools throughout the board, but I can tell you with a certainty that the equipment available at our local elementary school has clunky old CRT monitors. Even in the computer lab there isn’t even enough equipment for each child in a class to have access to their own computer. Going back a few short years, I can remember a time when a vandal had damaged some of the lab’s equipment and there was a possibility it would close because the school couldn’t fund new pointing devices. Luckily, some parents were able to arrange for the donation of second-hand equipment by a private company. So the little lab remains open, such as it is.

All that glitters is not gold, my friends. Is this school board really the cutting edge institution it appears to be? Or is all this glitz really a game of robbing Peter to pay Paul, with the goal of bolstering a failing institution’s reputation?

Lester B Pearson School Board has been consistently closing down its elementary schools and shuffling kids around over the past few years. The issue that is always addressed first is attendance: English school boards in Quebec are often heard to say that their declining enrollment is due in large part to the French Language Charter (aka Bill 101.) That wouldn’t do much to explain why school closures are also an issue in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario, of course.

Obviously declining school enrollment is a problem on a national level - or close to it. It seems to me the question that the media never examines is how schools come to be slated for closure/conversion. When our local school was (again) on the chopping block about a year ago we learned that the criteria are weighted heavily when it comes to the school’s attendance capacity, a number derived in large part from its square footage.

In this particular school there had been a number of rooms converted for adult education (science labs and such) which was later became useless space when the adult population was transferred to another facility due to concerns over young children and adults being educated in the same building.

Those classrooms sit empty now, as the laboratory equipment is not appropriate for primary aged students. However when the attendance to capacity ratio is examined, the area of those empty classrooms will always be considered by the board. As a result the school appears to have a chronically low enrollment which cannot be remedied, because the cost of removing the specialized equipment is greater than allowing the rooms to go unused. And just plain greater than the school can afford to deal with.

This school will likely be considered for closure each time the board needs to cut spending, unless and until someone can find a better solution for the unusable lab space. One wonders who originally decided to make such a costly renovation to the building - and what that person’s fate within the board has been….

Similarly, I understand another school in the board was closed because it required renovations to provide hot lunch facilities for students, and this was considered too expensive to be feasible. Students are now transported to another school while their former school was renovated to provide dormitory accommodation for 160 students recruited from other countries, who attend an international school that has also made the news rather prominently. The board’s three year plan shows that there are another five buildings simply standing empty at the moment.

While schools are targeted - sometimes repeatedly - because of issues around capacity/attendance or necessary renovations, the board’s latest $600,000 surplus from the 2006-2007 year. This is money the board said was going to be invested back in the schools - oh yeah, and the centres….

The board’s strategic plan for 2006-2009 identifies several goals it would like to achieve to improve itself, in four different categories. It is interesting to note that of the four strategies listed for improving graduation rates in schools experiencing difficulties in this area, one strategy is to “Affirm Vocational Education as a viable pathway to certification” (with an expected increase of 5% of referrals from the youth sector) and a second strategy is to “Promote Adult Education as an alternative and flexible path leading to certification/diploma and prerequisites for further learning” (again with a 5% increase in referrals by 2009.) (These figures apply to referrals made by high school staff, but further down in the list of strategies is the goal of increasing the adult enrollment itself by 10% as of 2009.)

While this seems to be a bit of a twist on the old practice of funneling students who don’t achieve into vocational education or waiting for them to drop out and later trying to pick them up as adult students, it’s not so very different perhaps. What is frightening is that it seems to be a higher profile and more acceptable plan now.

The other two strategies for improving graduation rates are to have the schools in question put their own plans into place (minimal board support,) and to provide more professional development for teachers who are instructors of the required math and sciences courses by means of “Board-wide and school-based team meetings” and “Review/study guides for teachers and students.”

Not as cool a plan as the “Regional initiatives grants and Professional Improvement grants” or the “Marketing measures and strategies targeting students, staff, administration, parents and professionals” suggested for increasing the vocational education referrals. The latter sounds to me like an all-out marketing plan, while the former could be anything from a sincere desire to create study guides, to an excuse to hold a couple of catered meetings and pay some overtime.

Were there other strategies to improve the student experience? Yes. Most of them involve teacher and administrator recruitment, training and support. Some had to do with updating physical plant and especially computer hardware/software, for which the board should be given a nod.

But it seems to me these are things that should be expected in a school board: a safe, clean environment in which to learn; adequate teaching materials and access to technology; properly trained staff. To my mind, these are the minimum requirements of a public school system. Without them we don’t have functioning schools, so they should come above all other priorities when choices must be made about where funds should be spent.

I did note that there was no mention of acquiring better books or other teaching materials, nor of working with the government and publishing houses in the province to see actual English-language textbooks produced for the secondary students who will soon be at a disadvantage when the curriculum reform rolls into secondary IV and V (see my post on this issue.) Instead, the board seemed more concerned with getting the word out about its students’ successes. In fact, specific modes for communicating these were identified and actual quotas were set. This is detail that was sorely lacking in the plans to improve graduation rates.

Wouldn’t it be great to see a school board whose elementary and secondary schools in the Lester B Pearson School Board being described as “state of the art”? I’m not naïve: I know that big publicity for adult centres and foreign language students means a higher profile board that gets better funding. But consider this: in a time of what is described as educational crisis, a board that put its youth students first and made sure they had the best of everything they needed to learn with would earn itself quite a reputation.

It’s a choice to be made, quite simply. Or not…

There are eleven senior high schools in the board. How many are well ranked according to the latest Fraser Institute’s school report card? John Rennie High School was rated a 6.5, and Beaconsfield High School received a 6.2 out of 10. These two institutions are considered the flagship schools of the board, their crème de la crème.

Rated on things like provincial exam marks, percentage of students who stay in school and graduate on time, gender equity, and how realistically school marks reflect the provincial marks, the high schools of Quebec’s largest Anglophone school board rated on average a 5.6 on 10. If that were a student mark it would be considered a failure in this province, as our public school pass mark is 60%.

Only one school out of eleven - and not one of the flagship schools - was rated in the top 100 schools out of more than 450 private and public institutions listed by the Fraser Institute. St Thomas High School was the top rated public school in the province. With a rating of 8 on 10, it actually ranked higher than some private schools. Sadly though, the three schools mentioned are the only ones in the board that received a rating of 6/10 or higher. Again, if we were looking at student marks that would leave the majority of high schools in this board with a failing mark.

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Our girls are still in primary school, so university is a ways down the road for them still. Yet, my ears are always perking up when I hear anyone talking about university admissions for homeschooled students. The professors I’ve heard from say they absolutely love to have homeschoolers in their classes, but we do worry about getting them accepted so they can take the classes.

These days it seems CEGEPs are not allowed to accept any student without a high school diploma. No more mature student status. And no, a GED or SAT scores do not get you anywhere. It’s a diploma from a recognized public or private school, or they have to sit the exams in continuing education to get their high school leaving certificate.

Today I received a link to a fabulous resource for those of you who have secondary level homeschoolers! It lists universities all over Canada and the United States that will accept homeschoolers, and describes the policy of each institution so you can plan well ahead if you know where your son or daughter wishes to apply.

It turns out that McGill is the only university in Quebec on the list. There may be others that accept homeschoolers, and if you know of any please sing out so we will all know about it! At this time, however, McGill is the only one confirmed in the province. There are a huge whack of schools in Ontario though - as many in that province as there are in all the rest of Canada.

So there are options, ladies and gents. That’s a relief!

Learn about McGill University’s policy regarding homeschooled applicants

Learn about higher education opportunities for homeschooled students

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One of my friends is expecting her first child this summer. She just had an ultrasound last month. I assumed it was her first sonogram, because doctors here generally order the first one around 20 weeks. In actual fact it was her third such test! She is being followed at a different hospital than I was for my babies, but if that hospital is anything like mine she spent an awful lot of time waiting around to see the ultrasound technician!

With the new 3D and even 4D ultrasounds now available, I imagine there will be a good demand for the newly trained ultrasound tech. The greying or aging of North America means that health professions of all kinds offer good job potential in the coming years. Patient interest in sonography as a safer alternative to x-rays and other tools is also making ultrasound tech school a popular place to head for career training.

The NOC code for medical sonographers is 3216. Sonographers do often specialize in gynecology and obstetrics, but other areas of specialization include abdominal sonography, neurosonography, opthalmologic sonography and pediatric sonography.

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At one of the sites I visited when I was getting some details to share with you on the various types of paramedics, the National Occupational Classification (NOC) Profile was mentioned. I thought this might be a topic worth including in career education at home.

NOC is a system that allows jobs to be classified according to a number of criteria, with each profession being assigned a numeric code. Job titles may differ from one province to another, and also from employer to employer. Using the code makes it possible to see that an ambulance attendant is probably doing pretty much the same job as an emergency medical technician - both jobs fall under the NOC code 3234.

The codes make job trends easier to measure. They are used by labour economists, human resources personnel, people providing educational or rehabilitative services. Jobs are assigned a code according to the type of skills it uses (e.g. management, sciences, sales, industry, etc.) Another part of the code consists of the skill level and the type of training required. Here, a job that required no training would receive a different code than one that demanded a university degree.

A young person or someone looking for a change in career can also use the codes to find a career that suits them, and then to learn more about the required training or the salary and job prospects in that field. Looking for a job is made easier by plugging the appropriate NOC code into a search engine. Jobs that correspond to that code will come up in the results quickly, whereas using keywords or job titles would be a lot more time consuming and it would be easy to miss opportunities if the individual omitted one or more job titles.

The NOC is based on the Canada census, and is updated using the results of each census. Thus it reflects current job trends and includes actual job titles used today. The first NOC was released in 1992, when it replaced an earlier classification system. It is published by Human Resource and Social Development Canada, in print form and on CD. It is also available on the internet free of charge. The Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) is a similar classification system, maintained by the Department of Labor in the United States.

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