New Westminster’s adult education program is continuing to thrive despite a switch to evening-only classes – but the program would love to offer daytime classes again if the district can find a way.
That message was delivered to the New Westminster school board at its operations committee meeting Feb. 9.
Principal Stephen Inniss updated the board on what’s been happening in continuing education this school year. Inniss noted the program has undergone a large shift since the school board voted last March to shut down daytime continuing education offerings due to space and financial constraints. Since then, the program has moved out of its former portable next to the old New Westminster Secondary School. Now, classes are offered in the new NWSS.
Registration numbers have dropped with the loss of the daytime courses. From September 2019 to January 2020, 510 students took morning and afternoon classes, and those classes no longer exist. From the same time period, 380 students took late afternoon and evening classes; this past fall, that number stood at 347.
“Nobody knew going into it what our sign-up would be for students, with the absence of a daytime program and with, of course, the presence of a pandemic. Would our students come in, and in what kind of numbers?” Inniss said, adding the end result has been positive. “Students are still finding us, or staying with us, if they’re able to come at night, in more or less the numbers that they were.”
NEW NWSS A GOOD SPACE
Inniss said the move to the new NWSS has been a positive in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic because the classroom configuration allows them to open the walls between spaces to make more room for social distancing. Even with that extra space, however, the program has switched to a hybrid model to accommodate the necessary distancing: half the students are in the classroom at any one time, with the other half learning remotely on alternating days.
“Students are struggling with, and largely succeeding with, the challenge of being partly online and partly present in person, and we’ve managed to show a lot of flexibility around that,” Inniss said.
Inniss noted they’ve made an exception for the very beginner English language learners, for whom the combination of technology and language was simply too much of a burden. For those classes, he said, the program has moved into the largest spaces it can find in order to keep students distanced.
There’s also been some flexibility for students to make way for those whose circumstances require them to learn predominantly online or, on the flip side, for those who lack the facility with technology and need to be present in person.
DAYTIME PROGRAMS A LOSS
Trustee Maya Russell asked what the school district could do for the program.
“It was a very difficult decision to reduce the scope of the program last year, and I’ve love to hear your sense of, what is the need? If you had a magic wand, what is the need we could be meeting?” she asked Inniss.
Inniss acknowledged the school board’s need to make difficult decisions but admitted the shift to evening-only classes has posed some challenges.
One of those, he said, is the effect on students who want to work their way through the multi-level literacy and math foundations courses, which move students from the very beginning foundations of reading and math all the way up to the equivalent of a Grade 10 level. With the daytime classes, Inniss noted, students could attend every day and finish each of those levels in six weeks; in the evenings, the twice-weekly course offerings don’t allow students to progress as quickly.
“Our students have repeatedly asked for daytime possibilities,” he said. “Those are things I would like to be able to do.”
He also noted that, for the second semester of courses (which just started Feb. 8), the program had to turn away some students because it wasn’t able to find all of the staff it needed. Staff were able to find the students spaces in other districts’ continuing education programs instead.
“It would have been nice to have had the ability to serve them here,” he said.
Overall, Inniss said, the space at the new NWSS has been welcoming for the adult learners. For instance, he noted, the “grand commons” space gives them a place to sit while they’re waiting for classes to start.
“We have space, and we have the essential. The essential they’re looking for is, ‘Give me an education and let me move as fast as I possibly can,’ and they have that, and it’s easy to access,” he said.
Follow Julie MacLellan on Twitter @juliemaclellan.
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