Manitoba's school boards have one purpose: to provide our students with the best schools possible.
School boards manage class size and staff levels to ensure all students have the supports they need to achieve.
Some students will always fall through the cracks . . . if we let them. The board and administration of The Brandon School Division were determined to do everything in its power to prevent that from happening to its students, and so the Off-Campus High School came into being.
This alternative approach to high school education evolved from an increasing awareness that a growing number of teenagers were leaving divisional high schools with incomplete standings and feelings of personal failure and inadequacy. The division conducted formal research into the problem, and came up not only with concrete data that supported their perceptions about this disturbing trend, but also with a poignant picture of the human cost of failing to meet the needs of too many students. Their response was to establish an off-campus high school, and it has been an extraordinarily successful initiative.
The school serves students ages 15 to 19 who have previously dropped out of high school for learning, socio-emotional or socio-economic reasons. When its doors opened in September of 2007, 22 students were registered. By the beginning of the next year, that number had increased tenfold, to 213 students. Personalized programming is based on an assessment of current achievement levels and learning preferences, and programming is augmented by counselling. The value of this personalized approach to learning was underlined in June 2008 when 39 students—all previous high school dropouts—graduated in a ceremony at Brandon City Hall that was attended not only by friends and family, but also by a large cross-section of community members and leaders.
For further information about the Off-Campus High School in The Brandon School Division, contact Superintendent Donna Michaels at 204.729.3104, or via e-mail at michaels.donna@brandonsd.mb.ca.