French Immersion Information Meeting Recap

This provides a summary of discussions at last night's French Immersion Information Session:

• Waterloo Region District School Board only offers "partial french immersion" as per provincial standards. The province stipulates that instruction from grade 1-7 must be 50% and reach a minimum of instructional french hours 3800hrs. Due to the fact in grade 7 and 8 we fall to the mid 30%, this reduction equals a 318hr shortage over the grade 1 to 8 time span.
• If you choose to have you child continue in the immersion program in high school it is the principal of that schools discretion whether your child will be allowed in the program. The reason is that our children do not hit that 3800hrs milestone of french instruction and therefore have not met provincial standards. That being said as long as children go through the 1-8 in our school board the principal will always approve them to continue. There is no recorded cases where a student has not been allowed to continue.
• Other boards are offering immersion earlier like JK and/or are providing 100% french instruction in jk and grade 1. Studies prove that children are like sponges in earlier years and pick up second language easiest at this stage in their lives.
• If your child moved to another school board you might have to "make up hours" or not be able to continue the immersion program since we fall short in instructional hours. It would be the discretion of that school/school board.
• Our high school program is on par with school boards across the province and meets provincial standards.
• The only reason our school board is running the partial french immersion program is because that is what we have always done historically. Seems to be no other reason.
• There have been some motions in recent years (2008 and 2009) to have this changed. The motions were to bring the board in line with provincial standards. There was also a motion to create a french immersion school. One of these motions was brought forward by a school trustee and one from the school board itself, both were voted down.
• Some discussion at the board level is if they were to offer 50% immersion at grade 7 and 8 what subjects would they teach in french that are being taught in french currently? Some of the subjects being looked at were math and visual arts.
• Parents can form a delegation and present a proposal at a school trustee meeting.
• Parents need to inform their principal of their desire to have the system changed.
• Parents need to let the respective school trustees know that they would like to see changes. Unless the trustees know that the community would like to see changes why would they otherwise?
• Parents should try to form a unified voice in order to have one consistent message along with showing the board there is a greater interest in changes to the program.
• CQAO provincial standardized testing is administered in only english even though immersion students learn math only in french up to that point. Some other school boards do offer both english and french based test. The results are always very consistent that immersion students always score the highest right across the board in all subjects across the province. Learning a second language at an early age helps develop a higher cognitive thought process which helps results in stronger results academically.
• There is not a shortage of teachers who could teach immersion if the board decided to change. This ruled out that concern as to why we do not meet that 3800 hours bench mark.
• The demand for french immersion in the region is growing each year. Parents are seeing the value in the program and are making the switch more and more.

Any questions? Reach out to any CMPS council member.