The Canadian School Boards Association (CSBA) is a national, nonprofit organization that aims to give school boards across Canada the opportunity to share experience and expertise in providing high-quality elementary and high school programs. CSBA speaks on behalf of its members on federal government policies and programs affecting education.
CSBA’s involvement in the issue of social inclusion stems from our ongoing efforts to profile the issue of children in poverty its impact on school readiness and eventual school success.
Following CSBA’s decision at its 1996 annual meeting to endorse the elimination of child poverty and, in line with the House of Commons 1989 resolution, CSBA published Students in Poverty: Toward Action, Awareness and Wider Knowledge in March 1997. Designed to raise the level of understanding and to identify ways in which school boards can made a positive difference in the lives of these students, the report generated wide spread commitment and interest countrywide.
Poverty Intervention Profile: Partners for Action, along with its accompanying annotated bibliography, built on our previous work by providing school boards with a self-evaluation tool to help them assess their current success in providing interventions for students in poverty and suggesting ways in which they might initiative or improve these interventions.
The development of the Profile was only the first step; encouraging boards to utilize it and assessing whether it really worked were the next. To achieve these goals, CSBA assisted ten school boards across the country in using the profile to mobilize their communities in support of students living in poverty. A third publication, Action Against Poverty: School Boards Making a Difference, summarizing the results of the work at the sites, will be released in late November.
Our work on social inclusion attempts to further expand and inform the current discussion and debate around the issue of child and family poverty and its impact on school success. By offering a broader framework within which school boards can examine its policies and procedures, it is hoped that constructive action by school boards is facilitated. The study is based on the belief that there are things schools can do to help build social inclusion and that communities can help to describe inclusion and the mechanisms for bringing it about.
For education, social inclusion, a term being used increasingly in Canada, means that all students have the opportunity to be part of society by learning and exercising their citizenship and democratic rights while in school.
Thus, schools have a key role to play in ensuring that all students receive the education that will enable them to become thoughtful, caring and productive citizens. Policymakers have a key concern to see that all children get the education to which they are entitled. Through the process of social inclusion, students are prepared to take their place as citizens in Canadian society.
As previously indicated, CSBA recently completed a project in which ten pilot sites undertook various initiatives to address the needs of students living in poverty according to the holistic framework of its Poverty Intervention Profile. The work at two sites was expanded to include the study of inclusion.
The study had two aspects: (a) the investigation of the concept of inclusion as it manifests itself in school settings and (b) the investigation of what schools can do to create inclusion for individuals and communities.
A review and summary of the research and professional-opinion writings related to inclusion, as it relates to students in school systems, was also undertaken.
The discussions with people in school communities across Canada did not unearth startlingly new information about actions that create exclusion. The discussions did give strong evidence that exclusion continues to exist and to be perpetuated in school systems.
Conversely, inclusive schools were found to show the following:
Although the writing and thinking on the contribution of education to social inclusion for children and youth in today’s world have not solidified into a researched blueprint for educational practice, the evidence gathered for this study, and supported by writings from diverse sources, points to a number of actions and activities school boards can undertake to further social inclusion. These actions are summarized in the following table:
| Area | Action |
| Educate |
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| Set policies |
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| Establish practices |
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| Establish partnerships |
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| Lobby |
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The findings will be of both strong theoretical interest and strong practical interest across the country.
The findings will be helpful to schools and school board members in assisting all students toward becoming contributing, connected community members. School board members will gain information on which to base their policies. The findings will lead to stronger policies, expectations, and understandings within school systems attempting to address social inclusion. As well, recommendations regarding the role of schools in creating social inclusion will be informative for the National Children’s Agenda.
Coupled with the findings of our ten pilot sites, which focused on community engagement, specific directions for action have been identified.
Marie is the Executive Director of the Canadian School Boards Association, the national voice of the provincial associations of school boards and school trustees. She has worked with school trustees for the past 15 years and assumed the role of Executive Director of CSBA in 1993.
Marie received her Masters degree in sociology in 1976 and has been involved in education policy development and research at the post-secondary as well as the elementary-secondary levels. Prior to her position at CSBA, Marie served in various capacities with the Ontario Public School Boards Association, including Director of Legislation and Finance as well as Director of Curriculum and Northern Issues. While a research associate with the Council of Ontario Universities, she undertook research into teacher shortages. At TVOntario she focused on distance education programs for adults.
She is a committed proponent of the need for a strong public education system governed by locally elected school boards and supports community-based collaborative approaches and solutions to educational issues and concerns.
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