Despite growing numbers overall, the Burnaby school district’s French immersion program consistently loses students at two-and-half times the provincial rate between grades 7 and 8, according to a report by the B.C. and Yukon branch of Canadian Parents for French.
The French-language advocacy group’s 2014 State of French Second Language in B.C. & Yukon Report shows enrolment in the local French immersion program grew by 2.73 per cent in 2013/14 despite a drop in overall student numbers.
The district was still slightly below the provincial average when it came to the proportion of students in the program, with 2,143 or 8.58 per cent of the district’s total 24,963 population enrolled, compared to 8.9 per cent provincially.
Burnaby’s dropout rate in grades 1 to 5 was just over one per cent higher than the provincial average last year – 16.58 per cent, compared to 15.21 per cent provincially.
But in grades 7 to 12, Burnaby students left French immersion at a rate 13 per cent higher than the provincial average – 55.97 per cent, compared to 42.96 per cent provincially.
The main driver of the high dropout rate was the transition from Grade 7 to Grade 8, where the Burnaby program lost 38.43 per cent of students, compared to 14.31 per cent provincially.
“That’s a huge dropout rate,” Canadian Parents for French B.C. executive director Glyn Lewis told the NOW. “That signals to me that there’s a bit of a problem there.”
Lewis, a graduate of Burnaby’s French immersion program, suggested the absence of a middle school model in the district might be a contributing factor.
He remembers the transition from École Inman Elementary School to Moscrop Secondary being a big one.
“I lived in North Burnaby, so I had to commute all the way over to Moscrop, which is in Central Burnaby,” he said.
Superintendent Kevin Kaardal told the NOW the district recognized the need for a high school program in the North in 2008/09, after a surge of interest in French immersion in the elementary grades.
The district added a program at Alpha Secondary in 2010/11, and attrition between Grade 7 and 8 dropped seven percent.
But local students moving from elementary to high school have continued to leave French immersion at twice the provincial rate in all the years since then.
Kaardal said the ongoing attrition was the result of a lingering “pattern of behaviour” that will change as the program at Alpha takes root.
He said the dropout rate between grades 7 and 8 is not currently a major concern because students are not leaving the district.
"We offer a variety of programs in the district,” he said. ‘We're happy that parents choose them, whether it's French immersion or AP or our career programs or whatever when they get to secondary."
Lewis, however, said students who drop out of French immersion between elementary and high school miss out on becoming functionally bilingual, something he said has provided him with “amazing” opportunities.
He said high dropout rates also cost the school district, as student-teacher ratios shrink throughout the program.
“The lower the enrolment in that class, technically the more that class is costing the school district,” Lewis said.
Kaardal called that “wrong thinking” in terms of the district’s total block of funding.
"It costs the same to put a teacher in front of students, whether there's 20 students in the room or 30," he said. “It doesn't impact the total block of funding.”
