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“It’s not the course I didn’t like. It’s the teacher.”
“No matter how hard I tried, it made no difference. I was still sinking.”
« We started drinking on Friday morning, then stopped on Tuesday. Then I didn’t come to school.”
They live in a particularly disadvantaged corner of Lanaudière, they are aged 14 to 16 and they are absent more than 100 days a year, despite the legal obligation to attend school.
The Carrefour jeunesse-emploi de Montcalm wanted to tackle this disengagement. He found funding and asked speaker Lory-El Dumas Daigle to do in-depth interviews with 15 young people, 7 parents and 6 workers.
And what emerges from this investigation is not so much delinquency as a lot of suffering.
“Today, we have to renew our mortgage because we could lose everything,” explained one young person, for example. Do I want to be here [à l'école]HAS ? No. Do I want to make money and then get us out of this hole? Yeah.”
The idea here was to understand the root causes of chronic absenteeism and not to quantify it, especially since a good part of the problem goes largely under the radar. Among other things, because some have the code for their parents’ computer portal “and themselves motivate their own absences”, notes Geneviève Rinfret, general director of the Carrefour jeunesse-emploi de Montcalm.
The rule of 10 consecutive days of absence which automatically triggers a call to the DPJ is also easily circumvented. “Some young people make occasional returns to school in order to “reset the counter to zero” and avoid intervention,” we can read in the report.
A young person interviewed as part of this research will also say that it doesn’t matter whether he is in class or not, no one really notices. “Since I am calm, I have not had any follow-up. It seems to me that it’s more the class clowns who have a following.”
“I study pus, it’s like that”
Sometimes it’s bad company that derails everything.
“In secondary 2, explains another, it was “so-so†. I made [mauvaises] meetings and I started to consume a lot, and I made decisionsmad. I went to school less, and I studied less, and that’s it.”
Academic difficulties also play a big role.
“When I saw that I was forcing myself to do the exams”, and that it was still “failure after failure, it demeaned me, I want it, I don’t want it”, says a young person.
And from there, the spiral: academic difficulties, demotivation, absences. Very quickly, it becomes a mountain.
I would wake up in the morning, then I would start not spinning, then I would have an anxiety attack, so I would call my mother. Mom, at the time, she wasn’t happy, she was arguing with me, but in the end, I still stayed at home.
A young person cited in the investigation
The anxiety is most often very real, but parents are also a little too quick to condone the first stomach ache that comes along, we read in the report.
Parents who themselves had a difficult school career “don’t necessarily prioritize education,” M observed in an interviewme Dumas Daigle, who signed the report.
In the document, she also cites a speaker who deplores the difficulty in contacting certain parents or their lack of collaboration.
Positive relationship with staff
Is it hopeless? On the contrary, all respondents agree that students in difficulty or at risk of absenteeism “are much more inclined to attend classes regularly when the relationship with the teacher is positive, supportive and secure”, we can read.
A young person will also salute the specialized education technician who stopped the bullying against him.
The perception of the quality of the courses also counts for a lot.
A young person will talk about his science teacher, “who was a big wow”, full of energy. “It was obvious that she liked showing science, compared to other teachers who, like, sit and barely talk.â€
“I went to classes that I liked, but not those that I didn’t like,” sums up another young person.
A follow-up to be put in place
Protocols are certainly in place to react to absenteeism, but they are often considered too late, irregular or slowed down by significant delays, and therefore not very effective, said those interviewed.
And all this is not trivial, “because chronic absenteeism leads straight to dropping out,” recalls Marc Alain, full professor in the psychoeducation department of the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières, who accompanied the Carrefour local youth-employment in its search.
In an interview, he laments that the Samares school service center does not have a statistical portrait of absences and is insufficiently proactive in the fight against absenteeism “which most often sets in from secondary 2”, he indicates. “Young people go from lesson to lesson with different teachers, often without anyone following their overall progress.”
He also observes a vicious circle: the young people he meets come from disadvantaged backgrounds and would particularly benefit from lasting links with the staff. However, as these schools are often considered difficult, staff turnover is particularly high there, as is the number of unqualified teachers.
The Samares school service center, in Lanaudière, from which comments were requested, indicated that it wished to “take the necessary time to read” the report “in order to fully understand all of the issues and put them into perspective.”
