Risky Business

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 The Delta School Board deserves praise for its vigorous pursuit of environmentally friendly technologies. But it also deserves admonishment for neglect of risk management.

Delta School District finds itself “on the hook” for millions of dollars. To diminish its carbon footprint, Delta entered into an agreement with FortisBC Alternative Energy Service for the installation of more environmentally friendly technologies. The technologies were expected to reduce emissions by 69% which would be equivalent to taking 450 cars off the road each year. When it approved the agreement, the B.C. Utilities Commission expressed concern about the financial risk the school district was assuming. Years later, FortisBC applied for and was granted a rate increase by the B.C. Utilities Commission that required the school district to pay about $1million dollars more each year for energy.

My hunch (and it is only a hunch) is that the Board neglected to think about the risks associated with the commitment they made. When you do not think about risks, you are really self-insuring – saying in effect that we can pay the price or suffer the consequences if something goes wrong.

It has too often been my experience that school boards do not think about risks. Early in the pandemic I wrote a blog about its economic impact on international student enrollment and school board budgets. In a more recent blog, I wrote about post-pandemic budgetary belt-tightening.

It is prudent to think about risks. When we buy a appliance, the salesperson often asks, “do you want to buy an enhanced warranty?” They are asking us to consider protecting ourselves against the cost of repair or replacement if the appliance malfunctions after the normal warranty period has expired. The protection is the extended warranty. The manufacturer has protected itself against the risk of appliance malfunction by excluding from the warranty operator error or misuse of the appliance. If we decline the extended warranty or the rental car insurance, we are choosing to self-insure.

Thinking about what could go wrong sounds pessimistic but is simply being cautious about protecting oneself. People living in areas that flood in the spring have sandbags at hand to protect their homes from flooding. Drivers purchase insurance in the event their cars are damaged or stolen, or they are involved in an accident in which people have been injured.

Thinking about what could go wrong needs to be coupled with thinking about the likelihood of the risk occurring and about the consequences of the occurrence of the risk. How likely is the anticipated risk? What impact will the anticipated risk have if it is does occur? Answering these questions is a probability/loss impact assessment. That is what actuaries who work for insurance companies do for a living. They ask, “what can go wrong?” and ‘how likely is it that will go wrong.” Once they determine that, they establish a premium that the insurance company charges to protect itself from losing money paying off the claims people make when whatever it was they were protecting themselves from takes place.

When Delta chose to install the new energy systems, they must have decided that those systems would work. I know this because they removed the systems the new technology replaced rather than keeping them as a parallel backup system. That calculation is just like the calculation computer users make when the decide to back-up their files. Among those who protect themselves from loss of information by backing up their files, there are those who calculated the impact and cost of having the back-up stolen or destroyed. They back up their files to the cloud. Back-up systems, extended warranties, automobile insurance, and running parallel systems are all strategies to mitigate the risk of loss.

Monitoring risks is another consideration. If I did not take the extended warranty, I had better begin putting money aside to replace the appliance as it ages because eventually it will need to be replaced. If I do not, I run the risk of making an unanticipated large expenditure. The lawyer representing Delta in its dispute with Fortis said, “The impact on my client's financial position is going to be very significant… the estimated $1 million in additional costs . . .  is going to have to come out of the program budget by which the district operates its schools.”

I said earlier that my hunch was the Delta Board neglected to think about the risks associated with the commitment they made. I said that because I do not think that, having evaluated the risks, they would have chosen to self-insure against them knowing the potential impact on programs and services for students.

Of course (and I say this tongue in check) the Delta Board could have attempted to protect itself against the annual loss of $1million by buying a lot of stock in Fortis!

Predictable response and unintended consequences

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

The looming reductions in school board budgets should not come as a surprise to anyone. The COVID 19 pandemic has been devastating for most people and costly for governments. School Board business officials have been warning school trustees that the dramatic decline in international students, increase costs for the efforts to alleviate the pandemic’s impact on school children and staff, and enrollment decreases were putting strains on budgets despite the additional money that governments provided to boards. Formal warnings probably weren’t necessary, but some governments have issued formal notice that belt-tightening is on its way.

School boards with sound strategic plans for the provision of education are likely well-positioned to cope with reductions. It will not be easy, but having a plan enables boards to prioritize the allocation of the resources that will be available. Those without such plans will have a more challenging time.

I have observed the school board budget setting process for more than 50 years. The response from teachers’ organizations is predictable. They will point out that children suffer when budget reductions occur, and that vulnerable children will suffer more than others. Thus, when CBC described the likely budget reductions, I was not surprised to read that the president of the BC Teachers’ Federation said:

When budgets aren't sufficient and when cuts have to be made, those who really suffer are children, and they tend to be the most vulnerable children that need the most supports.

As an advocacy organization for its members and for public education, a teachers’ federation must try to enlist support from the public to resist reductions to school board budgets. I get that.

There are a few unintended consequences of making such a statement. First, the claim is misleading. School boards typically go to great lengths to prevent budget shortfalls from affecting the classroom. And never have I seen a board focus budget reductions on services to vulnerable groups of students.

School boards, especially the ones with good plans, keep budget cuts away from the classroom by reducing or deferring expenditures for transportation, custodial care, day-to-day maintenance, district administration, school-sponsored extra-curricular programming, etc. No one likes making such decisions, but that is why we have school boards: to make decisions about how to spend scarce resources.

I do not deny that these decisions have an impact. Some students are affected by these decisions. Their travel time to school may be lengthier, their school less clean and well-maintained, their teachers with less support from district staff, and fewer extra-curricular programs. But it is a mistake and misleading to imply that students are suffering and that the students most vulnerable suffer more. It is untrue.

By almost any standard I can think of, students today are better educated than at any time in the past. They receive more solicitous care and support than ever before. Performance and graduation rates have, for the most part, steadily increased over the past 50 years. I do believe the school system should serve vulnerable students better. No one should be complacent about the equity gaps between groups of students. But, by any objective standard, students will not be worse off because of budget shortfalls.

Besides being untrue, pronouncements about students suffering cause stress for parents, and especially parents of children who are vulnerable. Pronouncements like these erode confidence in public schools and prompt those who can afford the tuition to move their children to private schools.

One only needs to look south of the border to see the impact that 50 years of rhetoric about ‘school failure’ has had on education in the United States. There are two education systems: one public and one private. Over time, the public system has been increasingly starved of the social and political capital that those who now attend private schools brought when their children attended public schools. Even within the public system, boutique programming has increasingly separated students and families by social class, colour, and language.

Few Canadians want such a system. I know I do not. That is why I worry about the spectre of ‘suffering students.’ There are better arguments to make for increasing resources to public education.

COVID 19 draws attention to students missing from school

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 

Heightened attention to systemic issues in education is one of the few good thing to have come from COVID 19.  The inadequacies of online learning and the challenges facing vulnerable student populations are two prominent issues. Another that has only recently received much attention is students who are completely absent from school; they are neither attending school or receiving instruction at home or elsewhere.

Chronic student absenteeism has been a problem as long as there have been formal education systems. In 1874, the provincial government in British Columbia introduced legislation to reduce student absenteeism by linking it to teachers’ pay. This approach to curbing absenteeism, very unpopular with teachers, was abandoned.  Two years later, the Public School Act was amended to put the onus on local boards of school trustees to enforce school attendance for students aged seven to twelve. In 1901, another amendment to the Act raised the minimum school leaving age to 14.

There is a long history of governments, school boards, and schools trying to address student absenteeism. The literature devoted to the topic is voluminous, but the evidence of success is limited.

Chronic absenteeism occurs for numerous reasons.

·       Family factors affecting school attendance include aversion to school because of the child’s or parent’s prior negative experiences; homelessness; insufficient resources for the food, clothing, supplies, and transportation that are needed for school; children who work to supplement family income or care for siblings so that their parents can work; peers or family members who do not value schooling; and the necessity of attending significant cultural community occasions – to name only a few. 

·     Student factors affecting absenteeism include lack of sleep; low self-concept or lack of confidence; boredom; criminal involvement; lack of prior school success; poor health (such as childhood obesity) and mental health (self-harm, suicidal ideation); frequent residential movement; dependence upon unreliable others to accompany or transport the student to school, etc. 

·         The school or the classroom environment can affect absenteeism: unwelcoming environment; lack of challenge or remedial assistance; bullying or shunning by peers; discrimination; in-school and out of school suspension; placement in special education; grade retention; etc.[1]

Confronted by a problem affecting large numbers of students, school systems try to find and implement programs to address the problem. But the enormous range of factors affecting absenteeism makes it difficult to craft a ‘program.’

There are many descriptions of programs designed to address absenteeism, but the evidence is scant. The programs that have demonstrable evidence of success are few, and their impact is limited. In fact, even successful programs only produce marginal improvement in attendance. Although the programs improve attendance, chronic absenteeism remains.

A second challenge to addressing chronic absenteeism has been the episodic attention to the issue. Absenteeism is not a problem that can be eliminated. Student absenteeism – especially chronic absenteeism – is an enduring problem for school systems, one that requires constant attention.

The idiosyncratic and persistent nature of chronic absenteeism makes it an expensive problem to address. Tackling absenteeism is not something that can be done off the side of someone’s desk, making it relatively costly.

But anyone prompted to think that the problem of chronic absenteeism in so intractable that additional resources should not be spent in addressing it should think twice. Everyone is paying the price of chronic absenteeism, not just the student.

• Chronic absence affects the student and the student’s peers. The student achievement of all students is affected by the absences of their peers. Chromic absent students make the teacher’s job more difficult. Adjusting instruction for students who are chronically absent reduces instructional time for other students and slows the pace of instruction.
• Chronically absent students are more likely to be disruptive when present. Classroom disruption eats up valuable instructional time. The impact is particularly great at the elementary school level where students remain with the same teacher throughout the day. Students at the secondary school level do not remain together for every subject, minimizing somewhat the impact of chronically absent students who are disruptive.

The impact of chronic absence is cumulative. Chronically absent students find their educational and life trajectories altered. Their achievement is poorer than their peers who attend school regularly. Lower graduation rates and higher school leaving rates take a toll on their employability, health, and may increase their involvement in crime.

I am hopeful that the attention that COVID 19 has drawn to students missing from school prompts efforts to bring missing students back to school and address chronic absenteeism.

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[1] See, for example, Reid, K. (2008) The causes of non-attendance: an empirical study. Educational Review, 60(4) 345-357.

Caring for and Educating Students in Care

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

I have been thinking about the students who are most likely to be vulnerable to the negative impact of COVID 19. Near the top of my list are students in care, children and youth receiving out-of-home care who should be in school because of the difference that school makes in their lives. Although estimates vary, there are likely 85,000 to 100,00 students in Canada who receive out-of-home care.

Placement in out-of-home care can occur for many different reasons: physical, sexual, psychological, or emotional abuse, neglect, deprivation, maltreatment, etc. The circumstances leading to children being in out-of-home placements and the challenges they face while in care have immediate and long-term consequences, including poor academic performance, dropping out of school, poor mental health, and poor attachment to the labour market.

Students in care are typically less engaged in school. High rates of tardiness and absenteeism are symptomatic of their more tenuous engagement. They are often disorganized (do not complete in-class and homework assignments), have poor mental health, and are involved in disciplinary incidents that often lead to suspensions and expulsions. Students in care are more likely than average to dropout. They have lower rates of graduation and are less likely than average to transition to post-secondary education because of their poor academic records.

Their negative experiences at home, in out-of-home care, and at school have a cumulative impact. When students in care become adults, they have more difficulty finding work, keeping jobs, and maintaining a stable residence. It is not surprising that many former students in care live in poverty, are homeless, and more likely to become involved in the criminal justice system.

Education is one of the key ingredients to ensuring the success of students in care. Several years ago, my colleagues and I reviewed the literature devoted to school-related efforts to support students in care. Although the literature was a bit of a hodgepodge, we were able to identify several factors that seem to play an important part in propelling students in care along a successful trajectory.

It will not surprise anyone that relationships matter. As it does with everyone, stable and trusting relationships with adults and peers, and the development of a stable social network make a big difference. Connection to others and the benefit that social and emotional support provide are very important.

It may be tempting to cut students in care some slack because of their circumstances. But doing the opposite appears to have a bigger impact. Setting high expectations and encouraging students in care to push themselves leads to better outcomes if the environment is physically, emotionally, and socially safe. Schools are often the safest environments that some children and youth experience.

The reasons why they are in care and circumstances in which students in care find themselves differ significantly from one student to another. That means students in care require services and supports tailored to their needs. The educational services and supports that students in care require will not have an impact until their basic needs are met.

Schools can make a difference but not without collaboration with agencies outside of school. Cooperation between schools and community agencies is essential to preventing students-in-care from falling through the cracks. Collaboration is not easily achieved without attention to clear definitions of roles and responsibilities, and resolving policy differences (privacy and information sharing, for example).

It appears crucial that there be someone in the school that the student in care attends who is designated as a case manager, an advocate and mentor for the student. Educators designated as a case manager must be freed from other responsibilities to carry the case management responsibilities effectively. Another approach to case management would be to designate the responsibility to a child and youth worker or a school-based social-work trained professional.

The case manager can help to ensure coordination among community agencies and services and supports in school for the benefit of the student in care. The active involvement of the student in care is also important. That involvement builds capacity for self-advocacy, a trait that will help the student in care when s/he leaves school.