Poverty, Education and Immigrant Children

From the Canadian Immigrant, January 2008, page 32, an article about poverty, education and children from immigrant families in an an area of Toronto where the majority never graduate from high school:

HEADING DOWN THE RIGHT PATH

Program helps youth in Regent Park - where more than 70 per cent of kids from immigrant families never receive diplomas

By Zalina Alvi

Sometimes all you need is a little support to get you on this right path. For high school kids in Regent Park, support comes in the form of the Pathways to Education program.

Since its launch in 2001, the program that provides support to at risk and/or economically disadvantaged youth in one of the poorest communities in Toronto has helped more than 300 young men and women graduate from high school. This is following a dropout rate that, before 2001, saw 56 percent of youth, and more than 70 per cent of kids from immigrant families, never receiving their diplomas.

According to Norman Rowen, the developer and ex-director for the Regent Park program and current director of research and evaluation for Pathways to Education Canada, the support the program provides is responsible for getting these kids across the finish line.

"The program was designed to say, 'What are the challenges that the kids face, and what are the supports that can be provided to change that dropout rate?'"

Today, that rate has fallen to about 10 percent for students involved with the program, with more than 80 percent of those who graduate going on to pursue postsecondary education. In a community where the challenges that youth face are aggravated by issues of poverty, this is a remarkable feat.

Rowen understands the seriousness of poverty in the community especially in light of the recent United Way report that identified Toronto as the poverty capital of the country.

"It is a view of trying to address some of the issues involved in poverty to give folks a better education," he explains.

"Attacking poverty through education has been a longtime dream of many folks."

The program offers four kinds of support to tackle these issues: academic, in the form of tutoring five nights a week; mentorship, which includes career counselling in grades 11 and 12; financial, including bus tickets to get to school and a postsecondary education tuition fund, and a student-parent support worker, who acts as a mediator and counsellor for the kids.

Many of the kids benefiting from the program are coming from immigrant families, a factor that brings with it its own challenges. For some, getting used to the education system is a difficult transition. For others, their situation is worsened by the fact that some parents have credentials that go unrecognized in Canada.

"That's part of poverty they face," Rowen asserts.

But this year, about 830 students are participating in the program, representing between 90 and 95 percent ofthe youth population in the community. In fact, it has been such a success that in September 2007, Pathways to Education Canada was created and similar efforts were launched in other cities around Canada, including Lawrence Heights, Rexdale, Kitchener, Ottawa and Montreal-Verdun.

Rowen explains why the program works.

"It's not simply mentoring, it's not simply tutoring, it's not simply a caring adult; it's actually organizing the immediate financial and long-term supports together with the other kinds of support - academic, social, motivation, psychological, all of those kinds of things that make it possible for kids to be successful."

And Rowen makes it clear that the youth remain the focus and motivation behind the program.

"The kids in Regent Park are a normal distribution of kids. They may have the stigma of being low income or tough, or gangs or whatever. But, in fact, they're normal kids. They're just kids who are homogeneously poor, that's the thing they have in common."

The thesis we went in with was that with those supports, the kids in Regent Park could be as successful as anybody else in the city of Toronto."