Foolish to cancel program aimed to help disengaged students before problems spiralled out of control

By Moira MacDonald, The Toronto Sun

Just over two years ago I wrote about a pilot program to help high school students on short-term suspensions get back on track so they didn’t end up in worse trouble down the road.

The targets for the Stop Gap program at Northern Secondary School were not violent students. They were the kids identified in the much-publicized, $800,000-plus Falconer school safety report — the classic “hall wanderers” — disengaged, skipping class and disrupting others.

They were students on three to five-day suspensions — the most common form of suspension at the Toronto District School Board.

These were the kids people were trying to get to before their problems spiralled into more destructive behaviour — and more expensive interventions.

I write “were” because last April Stop Gap was stopped, period.

When trustee Josh Matlow criticized director Chris Spence’s plan to spend $345,000 on a one-day teaching conference at last month’s board meeting, Matlow asked how he could explain the cancellation of a program for at-risk students due to funding problems when the board was prepared to spend exponentially more on a conference.

I won’t get into the conference debate here. The point is a program that was one of those “partnerships” the board says it wants to do more of, and one that was trying to do the prevention work the board and others in our city say is key to stopping another Jordan Manners-like death in our schools, was abruptly cancelled for lack of money.

Dale Callender, who created and coordinated Stop Gap, says it wasn’t for lack of students.

Callender works for Delisle Youth Services, a non-governmental social services agency. He continues to do youth counselling at Northern as part of his Delisle job, but that work does not target the at-risk students Stop Gap did, or offer its intensive support.

“It’s frustrating because not having Stop Gap this year I can really see why I developed it,” Callender told me. “There’s a population of students out there whose needs aren’t being met.”

Some 26 kids went through the program in 2007/08. After an interruption (Callender says a union grievance was filed), Stop Gap ran again in 2008/09 with 52 students from five high schools.

As of press time yesterday, nobody at the board could confirm to me the total cost of the program — maybe that’s part of the problem. But last year the program was supplied, through a TDSB/Delisle partnership, with a coordinator, a teacher, a child and youth worker and expense money.

Instead of the student sitting at home or wandering elsewhere during their suspension, that kid would be in school, working intensively with staff to figure out why he or she was disengaged and starting a game plan to get back on track.

Delisle would follow up with students for a three-month period afterward and connect them with other community services if necessary. Usually students had fallen far behind in their courses and could not see how to get caught up.

There were problems with anger management, mental health, low self-confidence, learning disabilities and substance abuse.

Sounds like the typical dark side of teenhood to me, not a kid to be kicked to the curb.

Interested parties are meeting today to figure out how Stop Gap could be restarted.

Wrapped up in the dilemma are union concerns about using workers from outside agencies, board/union rules on staffing, who pays what, and if the board can find a new funding stream for Stop Gap.

“No one anywhere has suggested (Stop Gap) wasn’t a great success – it was,” says Matlow. “At the end of the day, if it works, it works. We just have to figure out how to get there.”

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