After beginning as a pilot project a special classroom in the Saskatchewan Rivers School Division is expanding as the new school year is ready to start.
The division is adding Student Engagement Centres to two more schools, Riverside, Vincent Massey and WJ Berezowsky School will be adding the centres this year.
Superintendent Kelly Gerhardt said the Student Engagement Centres provide targeted supports for groups of students and this in turn supports teachers.
“They’re filtering students in and out of their learning space,” Gerhardt explained. “They’re receiving intentional targeted instruction but not necessarily on curricular outcomes. (It’s) on social emotional learning, executive functioning, regulation, those kind of mental health pieces that help students access regular curriculum.”
Gerhardt said students learn these things through hands-on activities, games, crafts, storytelling and other activities.
“They do land based activities. They do experiential learning. It just supports that skill development and some of those areas they need just extra support with,” Gerhardt said.
The program started in Queen Mary three years ago
“They created the model with support from division staff and then Arthur Peachey and John Diefenbaker got one last year,” Gerhardt said,
“Now we have six of these programs and they all look similar in terms of the purpose for the most part, but they are all a little different depending on their student body and their population and what they’re trying to target.”
Gerhardt said that they have worked to improve the program since it launched at Queen Mary as a pilot project. She said that the rooms continue to evolve and iron out kinks.
“They really try to engage families in what the students are learning in terms of those skills and the language and the strategies,” she explained. “Some of that can transfer into the home and then it transfers into the classroom setting as well, so whatever they’re doing in that SEC is spread out to the families and then to the classroom teachers as well.”
She said that some of the targeted work in showing students how use executive functioning skills like flexibility, sustained attention, task initiation, response inhibition, working memory, and emotional control. They also work on planning and prioritization, organization, time management, persistence and metacognition.
She said that these are skills not everybody just acquires, and people have to learn them and be taught.
“We take for granted that people just acquire these skills as they get older,” she explained. “They need to learn them, and lots of kids aren’t learning them anymore.”
She said there are many theories as to why children are not learning these skills including less free play as children grow up.
“That’s not the only reason, but I mean, it’s part of what we’re seeing,” she said.
The division is also adding some new mental health capacity building strategies that they are very excited about as well, which she said are along the same lines as what is learned in the classrooms.
“(It’s) just that social, emotional, relationships, repairing relationships, collaboration, emotional control, understanding our emotions, naming our emotions, and then doing things to calm our bodies,” she said. “Some of that self-talk, breathing. It’s different for everybody, right? It’s finding what works for you.”
Gerhardt said that it is mostly about building skills and not necessarily a special program.
“It’s like giving the students the skills to access relationships, a sense of self and then essentially curriculum right,” she said. “I mean, our job is curriculum and learning so we want to remove those barriers. If regulation is a barrier for them we want them to have the skills to regulate so that they can learn.”
The Student Engagement Centres are possible because of more funding from the Ministry of Education. The first day of school is Sept. 2.
