Education — Issue No. 9 — Monday, June 5, 2006 (HTML)

2006 Legislative Session: Second Session, 38th Parliament
SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
MINUTES AND HANSARD

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
EDUCATION



CONTENTS

		Page

Presentations		151
	D. Athaide
	Y. Chard
	L. Weinstein
	V. Campbell
	L. Toews
	C. Friesen
	B. Krieger
	V. Guenther
	L. Dickson
	R. Stock
	M. Fazeli

Chair:	* John Nuraney (Burnaby-Willingdon L)
Deputy Chair:	Gregor Robertson (Vancouver-Fairview NDP)
Members:	Daniel Jarvis (North Vancouver–Seymour L) * Richard T. Lee (Burnaby North L) * Lorne Mayencourt (Vancouver-Burrard L) * Mary Polak (Langley L) * John Rustad (Prince George–Omineca L) John Horgan (Malahat–Juan de Fuca NDP) * Doug Routley (Cowichan-Ladysmith NDP) * Diane Thorne (Coquitlam-Maillardville NDP) * denotes member present

Witnesses:

Dileep Athaide (Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of B.C.)
Virginia Campbell (Invergarry Learning Centre)
Yvonne Chard (Adult Basic Education Association of British Columbia)
Lynda Dickson (Servants Anonymous Society Surrey)
Mohammed Fazeli
Chris Friesen (Canadian Immigrant Settlement Sector Alliance)
Victor Guenther (Adult Educators Provincial Specialist Association)
Beverley Krieger
Phillip Legg (Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of B.C.)
Richard Stock
Lynda Toews (Surrey Teachers Association)
Lee Weinstein (Principal, Invergarry Learning Centre)

J. Nuraney (Chair): Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am sorry for the delay. My name is John Nuraney, and I am the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Education. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you all to the Education Committee's public hearing in Surrey. It's a real pleasure for us to be in this fine city. As you can see, we brought the sun with us, and that's what we do wherever we go.

For your information, today's meeting is a public meeting which will be recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services. A copy of this transcript, along with the minutes of this meeting, will be printed and made available on the committees website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/education. In addition to the meeting transcript, a live audio webcast of this meeting is also produced and available on the committees website to enable interested listeners to hear the proceedings as they occur. An archived copy of the audio broadcast will also be retained on the committees website.

Let me also, for the benefit of the presenters, read out the mandate of this committee and what the committee has been given by the Legislature. This Select Standing Committee on Education was reissued the following terms of reference by the Legislative Assembly on February 20, 2006. The mandate reads that the committee be empowered to examine, inquire into and make recommendations with respect of finding effective strategies to address the specific challenge of adult literacy and, in particular, to conduct consultations to consider successful strategies from other jurisdictions on the promotion of adult literacy and specific strategies to improve literacy rates among aboriginal people, English-as-a-second-language adults, and seniors. The committee is required to report back to the Legislative Assembly not later than November 30, 2006.

Today we have a number of people working with us. We have Wendy Collisson and Marian van der Zon from Hansard Services, who are managing the technical part of our meeting. They record what is said during the hearing, and then Hansard produces a transcript of what people say, which is posted on the Internet. A little caution to make sure that you say the right things.

We also have staff here from the office of the Clerk of Committees. We have Kate Ryan-Lloyd, to my left, our Committee Clerk; and our researcher, Josie Schofield, who is in the back of the room at the information table.

I would now like to have the members of the committee introduce themselves, starting from my far right.

D. Thorne: Good afternoon. I'm Diane Thorne, the MLA for Coquitlam-Maillardville.

D. Routley: And to the far left, I'm Doug Routley, MLA for Cowichan-Ladysmith.

L. Mayencourt: And even further left, Lorne Mayencourt for Vancouver-Burrard.

J. Rustad: Hi. I'm John Rustad, MLA for Prince George–Omineca. I just want to say thank you for coming out today.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, members. Our first presenter today is the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of British Columbia, and I believe Dileep will start the presentation.

D. Athaide: Good afternoon all, and thank you for the invitation to speak to your committee. My name is Dileep Athaide, and I am the secretary-treasurer of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of B.C. I'm here with Phillip Legg, our policy and research staff representative.

Our federation represents over 10,000 faculty and staff who work in B.C.'s colleges, university colleges, institutes and universities. We will leave two documents with the committee that I will briefly refer to in my remarks. The first is the research paper that we co-sponsored along with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives that was written by Shauna Butterwick, an education faculty member and researcher at UBC's faculty of education. It's called The Path out of Poverty, and it summarizes some of the impacts that provincial policy changes have had on students in developmental education.

The second document is a proposal that we, FPSE, have put forward to the Ministers of Advanced Education, Employment and Income Assistance, and Education recommending a series of changes to improve education outcomes for students in developmental education programs.

My own professional experience spans two disciplines: geology and developmental education. For 31 years I have taught in both areas at Capilano College in North Vancouver.

As a public post-secondary institution, my college prides itself on some of the leading-edge work that we did around adult literacy, developmental education and community outreach. You, in fact, had an opportunity to hear about some of that work when Dr. Greg Lee, our president, appeared before your committee on April 11.

The interest that our federation has in the area of developmental education, including programs in areas like adult basic education and adult literacy, is rooted in the mandate that we believe our colleges and institutes have. That mandate is to serve our communities and ensure that there is full access to opportunities in post-secondary education. That mandate means that we open our doors to all adult learners, and where there are gaps in their skills, confidence or ability, we design programs and courses that encourage success.

We are glad to see this committee undertake important work to understand how provincial policy and funding must change to meet at least one of the great goals that the Premier has identified as critical: that is to have B.C. become the most literate and best-educated jurisdiction in Canada. However, we are discouraged to learn that part of your public consultation process has been cut short. The public hearings that were scheduled for Castlegar, Prince Rupert and Prince George have been cancelled. That's bad news, not just for those regions but also for the important input that this committee needs to gather from the non-metropolitan areas of our province.

In one of your first hearings you heard from Dr. Ron Faris, who described some of the geographic profile of adult literacy. As his maps showed, rates are much higher outside metropolitan areas.

It seems clear to many that if you want to really understand the problem, you need to make a very concerted effort to ensure that citizens and stakeholders in these regions can fully participate in this process. The notice time was relatively short for those hearing dates, and you should reconsider your decision. Even if it means rescheduling to dates that work better for these communities, you should make every effort to gather input from the non-metropolitan areas of our province.

In our brief to the three ministers, we noted that there is considerable urgency in finding ways to increase opportunities for adult learners to pursue post-secondary education and training. Let me just summarize some of the key points that we mentioned in that brief.

First, we agree completely with the economic benefit that comes from improving skills, education and training levels. The C.D. Howe study, for example, shows the strong correlation between better literacy levels and stronger economic growth. We concur.

Similar research by the CCPA shows that the public investments in public post-secondary education, in general, have significant and positive rates of return. Why? Well, simply because better skills support higher incomes, which in turn support higher revenues to government. It's often referred to as the education dividend. We recommend that the committee members and staff review that work done by UBC economist Bob Allen for the CCPA on this issue.

Second, British Columbia has a gap that it needs to close when it comes to post-secondary education and skills training. Currently about 59 percent of B.C.'s workforce have some form of post-secondary education or training. They have a degree, a certificate or diploma, or have completed apprenticeship training and have a certificate to that effect. However, we are told that 73 percent of all new jobs require some form of post-secondary education or training.

Third, B.C. is facing a serious skills shortage. The combination of demographics and the changing skill demands of our economy are making it difficult for many employers to fill existing vacancies. According to the forecast council, the skills shortage has the potential of substantially undermining economic growth prospects in our province.

Fourth, increasing opportunities for post-secondary education and training is also about citizenship. We need to ensure that every citizen has the skills and confidence to fully participate in their economy and their community. Sustainable democracies don't work if more and more citizens are marginalized. Lacking basic literacy skills is one way in which those citizens get marginalized, and we can do much better to ensure that doesn't happen.

It's an unfortunate fact that none of these points is particularly new information. We've known for some time that demographic pressures will exacerbate a skills shortage and that we need to increase post-secondary education and training to head off that outcome and close the gap in our existing skills profile. We have also known about the education dividend and the positive returns that come from public investments in post-secondary education and training.

If you look at the policy changes made over the last five years, none of them has helped address these problems. The deregulation of tuition fees, the move to block funding for our post-secondary institutions and the chronic underfunding of per-student funding needs in our post-secondary institutions have made difficult problems worse, in our view.

I mention all of these systemwide problems because we don't think that you can properly address an issue like adult literacy in isolation. Adult literacy is part of a broad continuum of challenges that our post-secondary system takes on every day. When we are able to provide those courses and programs, we are also able to ensure that those programs are laddered and articulated into the entire post-secondary system. We think the greatest benefit that we can provide an adult learner is more than the confidence and skills to do more. It is the bridging that the learner gets into training and skills that are recognized across our province and across our country.

What kind of solutions should your committee be considering as part of its recommendations to government? There are several important areas to address. Both of the documents that we are tabling with you today discuss those solutions in more detail, but let me highlight a few of the more critical ones.

(1) Make adult basic education tuition-free in all our public post-secondary institutions. Fees are a barrier to access, and ABE fees are a barrier that hurt the most vulnerable students in our system.

(2) Provide funding to ensure that there are sufficient support mechanisms for adult learners in our institutions. The move to block funding all but eliminated counselling services to students, for example — a move that really hurt lower-income students and many adult learners who were returning to upgrade their education.

(3) Recommend that per-student funding for our public post-secondary system return to at least the level that existed prior to 2001. The chronic underfunding of the entire system has discouraged many adult learners from returning to upgrade their skills.

(4) Encourage public post-secondary institutions to re-establish the outreach programs that they had developed in the 1990s but abandoned because of budget-cutting pressures over the last five years. Many of our institutions set up very effective community outreach programs that delivered a range of developmental education programs. We need to encourage that innovation again.

(5) Recognize that delivering developmental education programs successfully requires a high level of skill and that our public post-secondary system has the expertise and the infrastructure to deliver those programs in every community throughout our province.

(6) Recognize the link between poverty and low levels of literacy, and recognize that you can't address one without addressing the other. I appeal to you once more to examine our brief to the three ministers in which we describe the policy changes needed to help low-income adult learners to re-engage with the post-secondary system.

(7) Ensure that adult literacy programs are the responsibility of one ministry. We believe strongly in the principle that adult learners need to learn in an adult environment. That environment is one that our public post-secondary institutions have worked hard to create. For that reason we recommend that the Ministry of Advanced Education take responsibility for those programs.

One last point in conclusion. At previous hearings there has been some suggestion that a literacy secretariat be created to oversee literacy programs. We see this as creating unnecessary administrative oversight. The real demands are for program support in the public institutions. That's where the funds should be directed, and that's where limited resources will have the greatest impact. Thank you.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Dileep. Before I move on to the next one, just a point of clarification. This committee was very much looking forward to visiting the three interior townships that you mentioned. It was because of the very low registration of witnesses that we made the decision, which was very unfortunate. I can assure you that it is the intention of this committee to reach as many people as we can, and there will be extensive advertising that will take place right through the province, encouraging people to send us submissions either orally or in writing.

Whoever and wherever, if there is anybody who needs any assistance in doing this, the committee will be there supporting, to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to make their submission to the committee.

M. Polak: You mentioned the shift of block funding as a cause of the removal of counselling service. How is that so? I ask that based on my past experience in the education system. Block funding basically means it's a decision over to the governing body. How does block funding equate with the removal of counselling, other than the body itself making that decision?

D. Athaide: I'm happy to answer that. Prior to block funding we had envelope funding, essentially. There was an envelope specifically for developmental ed programs, for special ed, for ESL, for adult basic ed. That ensured that every institution provided those developmental programs.

The unfortunate part about block funding and the way government seeks accountability from our institutions right now…. Virtually, the only form of true accountability is in numbers of student FTEs, or full-time equivalents, that are generated. I'm sure some of you know it's the big lecture halls that you have, in universities in particular, where they pack in 300, 400 and sometimes 1,200 and 1,400 students, that generate the huge numbers of FTEs.

Developmental education programs by their very nature need to be in small classroom sizes — a lot of one-to-one teaching; a lot of sort of classroom tutoring. Don't forget that these are students, in a great number of cases, who have not had much success through their early life in education, and they need all the support. They need a far greater degree of nurturing in their education when they come back to try and re-enter the education area.

M. Polak: Am I correct, then, that your preference would be for the province to take back that decision-making around counselling services and, basically, insist that they fund counselling as opposed to allowing the institutions to make that decision?

D. Routley: Thank you for the presentation. You've pointed to some demographic realities that we struggle with: a skills shortage, but also a shortage of young people — that we have an aging population, and what better time to invest in young people than now? The cuts that have been mentioned were very damaging, particularly because of that reality and lost opportunity.

You point to the poverty link. The social determinants of health — housing, education and other elements of society, community and public services — have been cut. We see, when we look at the geographic map of the province that you referred to, that areas that are economically challenged are also challenged with issues of literacy and personal success.

Coming from a resource-dependent community myself, I'm very aware of the fact that people in the metropolitan area will well embrace the alienation they have from Toronto or central Canada but not be appreciative of the alienation that small communities have from the metropolitan areas of this province and the attention that big projects get in the big cities while we struggle with issues of employment and education and other services.

Given that we're not attending those meetings in the interior, can you offer a view for us from your col-

leagues in those areas of what their struggles are, what particular areas of deficiencies there are and where increased funding from the province would best be directed?

D. Athaide: It's sort of related to Ms. Polak's question, because of the way the accountability that's demanded from the government of our institutions works. We have some of our smaller colleges in the Kootenays, also Vancouver Island — North Island College, for example — where they've had outreach programs in the form of small campuses or centres that have served mainly students seeking upgrading in developmental programs, and those have been cancelled in the last few years. The reasons they've been cancelled is because they just don't have what's considered a sufficient number of students.

Again, this is where the metropolitan versus regional disparity comes in. It's much easier in a metropolitan area to get those students, but in smaller centres you have to be willing to extend that service even if the numbers are small. Again, part of the block funding means that the institutions are not willing to do that because they get better returns, if you like, for their dollars spent in programs where they've got a huge number of students per class.

That is a shame, because it's precisely in these regional areas when the job market turns sour and resource-based logging industry and pulp mills shut down that adults need to go back and get retrained. For so many of them, the retraining begins right at the basic level that we call literacy level. That's why I said earlier how important our public post-secondary institutions are. We offer those, and the magic words like bridging and laddering for adult students who come in.

While they're still working on very basic literacy language concerns and basic numeracy skills, depending on how they achieve in different subject areas, they can be taking higher levels and university transfer courses. They can start trade programs and vocational programs concurrent with that upgrading. That infrastructure is there in our public institutions.

D. Routley: A supplemental. You also referred to the idea that post-secondary education should be tuition-free. I referred earlier in the day, in another meeting, to a UN study that placed Norway at the top of the ladder of countries with education achievements — Canada second, the United States 32nd.

Norway has tuition-free post-secondary education and no standardized testing in K-to-12, whereas the U.S. has higher post-secondary tuition fees and very high reliance on standardized testing. We seem to be steering ourselves towards a model that more represents the American model of standardized testing and increasing tuition fees. I don't know how we can achieve the goal of being tuition-free. What do you think would be the benefits that our communities and society would see if we could achieve that?

D. Athaide: Just to clarify, Mr. Routley. Our recommendation is to make ABE tuition-free — adult basic education. That's very realizable, because it used to be tuition-free until very recently.

Of course it's a noble goal to have all post-secondary education free. In fact, this is where that economic dividend really comes in. Places where they've gone that route — and you've cited a couple — have shown that the benefit to the human capital in those countries as a whole has just been enormous. The cost, the investment in public education to ensure free post-secondary education, pays back dividends many times over.

J. Rustad: I'm conscious of time, and I'm going to try to be as brief as possible in comments and question. In our province today we're running record-low unemployment rates — 4 percent or thereabouts in various areas. Given that over the next 12 years the projected is going to be a million jobs and we're only going to be graduating 650,000 students…. This means we have a shortfall of 350,000 jobs, ballpark, over that period of time. It's going to be very difficult to see a large number of people….

Let me rephrase that. What I suspect you're going to see is a large number of people who are going to be gainfully employed. Therefore, the opportunity to take ABE or other courses to further literacy and education is going to be limited.

Have you as a group encouraged the institutions that you work for or partner with to engage employers and engage industry to find a new way, to think outside of the box, in delivering education — to find a new way to try to reach out to those employees who need or could benefit from skills upgrading but who, because they're employed, are finding a different way to have that partnership to be able to give them those skills?

D. Athaide: We have always had the opportunity for employers to sponsor their employees to go back and get their education. That's everything from taking MBA courses down to basic literacy courses. That's always been there.

In fact, in the past we used to have some employers that would buy blocks of seats in our public institutions. I know in the old days, when I started, Canada Manpower used to have Manpower-sponsored students. Then the Human Resources Development agency, the federal group, would sponsor individual students. That's always been there.

It's true that employment levels are very high now, but when you say "gainfully employed…." If you look at the type of jobs that young people are being absorbed into, very few of them are truly career jobs. They're minimum wage or close to minimum wage, and they are basically temporary jobs.

The reality is that in our public institutions, our college system, we have doubled tuition fees in the last three years — doubled. This is anecdotal information, but I know firsthand and from my colleagues in the

system that a lot of students who are marginal students — the "C," "C minus" students — will take a term, and then they will more readily drop out to pick up one of those jobs at $9 or $10 an hour, because that fee differential has now become…. The tuition fees have become so high.

As you make education more and more difficult for young people, they are more attracted to these low-paying jobs. Of course, statistically that shows up as a higher employment rate. But quite frankly, in the big picture, those are not the type of jobs that we are looking for our young people to be going into.

J. Nuraney (Chair): I thank you, Dileep and Phillip, for taking the time and coming before the committee.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Our next presenters are from the Adult Basic Education Association of British Columbia. They are being represented by Yvonne Chard.

Just a housekeeping reminder. You have 15 minutes, allowing five minutes of questioning.

Y. Chard: Actually, listening to the last speakers, I thought: fifteen minutes? We could spend days doing this. My comments today are very general. I haven't looked at statistics and research, because it's all out there. I've tried to keep my remarks more general.

Our little association of the Adult Basic Education Association of B.C. is not a huge one, but we're very proud of our association because it has people from colleges, school districts, first nations, and prisons all included. So when we meet, network and travel around the province, we kind of get a picture from all of the different types of agency. I think we're unique in that we do that.

I was sitting and looking at you a minute ago, thinking: how would you feel, and can you imagine the pressure on an illiterate person who can't read? No e-mail about this meeting, no notes for the meeting, no name cards here, no daytimer to keep track of yourself. How would you feel coming here, trying to remember everybody's name and how to get here, not having any notes to take away, couldn't write notes as you went along. You would be very frustrated. This is the frustration that's felt by people who can't function literally.

I've lost three students this year. I teach a night class, and we have to have fifteen students to function financially. I had three guys come in this year who were so low that I couldn't teach them. I can't afford to run 15 students like that. I can't find 15 at the same time in Delta anyway. Those are the people we're losing, and they're truly illiterate. That's very sad.

I tried to say: "Okay. You want some suggestions." I looked at the mandate, and I thought about first nations. There are some bands around the province with great programs. There are some without. We tried many times to have programs in the Tsawwassen Indian band; they failed. I don't know the reason. I think the only thing you can do is talk to people who are successful and find out how they are successful and why.

I hear a lot that the literacy levels for the first nations people in the north are very, very low. The answer is not to give them more computers, because if you're not literate, you can't use a computer well and function. That's not really an area of my expertise. I just said: they need resources.

I had a phone call the other day from a lady up north — some band I've never heard of — who said she had money for a literacy program. She had no curriculum. She had no idea what to do. I think that's sad. If there's money for the program, there should be money for resources, and there should be help for that woman.

I thought about seniors. I don't know very much about seniors and literacy. I have seen — and you have notes — people come from the IWA. These men came to Canada maybe 30 years ago and got great jobs at the mills making $25 an hour. Everything was wonderful until they were about 45, and then their back gives in. Suddenly, they're not literate. The IWA says: "Can you get these guys ready to work in an office, because we can't use them in the mill anymore?"

I had a man who couldn't read the alphabet. He couldn't sit down for ten minutes to handwrite, because his hand was not used to small muscle development. His back ached. We cried the day he read four sentences — but that man will never work in an office. The last I heard was they were going to try to make him a security guard if he could read a licence plate.

We've had some seniors in our program, but they really don't want to work with young people who are bright and smart and learn more quickly. I think that where seniors are needing literacy, you have to establish special programs for them.

The area that I have most experience with myself is the immigrant area. I'm also on the ELSA Net association. They will be sending you a written brief, because they're not here today and they need more time.

I have a lot of points under immigrant education. I'm sure you must be aware of the ELSA program. It's a great program for the people who fit the criteria. Unfortunately, if you come over here from Quebec, you can't go to the ELSA program, so you don't get that ESL education. If you're a refugee, or you happen to be born in Canada or somehow come in as a Canadian citizen without speaking English, in the lower mainland you're not eligible to go to that program.

So you get a handful of immigrants with no English. They can't speak English, but they're also not eligible to go into the literacy programs in the school districts — I'm not sure about the colleges — with our current mandate. For many years we were told that ESL problems are not literacy problems, so therefore the immigrants have to pay for their education. Many do in Vancouver — $2.50 an hour, $10 for a TOEFL course. ESL has not traditionally been viewed as a literacy-type program.

What we're finding now in the ELSA program…. There are strict rules for the people in the program. My program is four days a week. You must attend every day. With the changes to work, a lot of students now work 12-hour shifts maybe three days a week, and then they're off for a few. They can't follow the attendance policy, but there's nothing there as an alternative for those people — certainly in Delta and Surrey. Maybe Surrey — I think Bob has something, and he might want to correct me.

The higher-level courses you have to pay for. When you finish ELSA level three, you're probably functioning at about a grade four level of English. In many parts of the province, that's it. They say: "When you're ready, you can go to college and take university courses." Well, what are you supposed to do between grade four and grade 12?

I hear great frustration from people in the Vernon area. They say there's nothing in there for people. There are a lot of places, a lot of unhappy people, where there is nothing. I think on north Vancouver Island there are not a lot of alternatives. It's kind of an uneven playing field. In the lower mainland there is a lot more opportunity.

Literacy learners progress very slowly, and this is another problem. You heard earlier about accountability. We're supposed to show that when we're teaching students, they're making progress. The very low-level literacy students make incredibly slow progress, and it's very hard to measure that progress. I feel that we need to establish special programs for the people who are not literate at all. Mostly they're immigrants.

I have a lady from Nigeria. She can talk to me at nighttime. Conversation is pretty good. She still can't recognize one written word. She keeps saying: "Why can't I go to the next level? You know, I've been here a long time." I think: how can you go to the next level? Everybody up there can read.

There is a lot of negativity in the community towards ESL training being free. Even in places I go other than my workplace, they say: "Why should these people be getting free courses? They should go back where they came from." I hear this every week. I think we need to do some educating of the public about the value and the necessity of immigration in this country, because it's not seen.

The diversity always surprises me, because in ELSA we see statistics. I look at my picture in Delta, and I have something like 60 percent of family-class immigrants. Probably 85 percent are from India, but that is not the provincial average. We have to remember that. The provincial average for the East Indian community is about 12 percent. Chinese is way up. We have to be very careful that we don't look at one neighbourhood and think this is the picture for the province, because it is not.

I'm hearing a lot about day care. People say they can't come to school because they don't have day care. I heard of it because somebody said that last week she looked into a day care downtown. There were 400 children on the waiting list, so that's not very encouraging.

I guess my main point…. I don't necessarily agree that all literacy training should go to the colleges, but I do feel it is very confusing. We have the Ministry of Education, which is school district courses, and Advanced Ed, college courses. Literacy B.C. has practitioners around the province. We have many different agencies — workplace literacy. The overlap between all of those ministries plus the child care ministries and the welfare ministries can be very confusing. Even with all of those people in the game, we're missing a lot of people.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thanks very much for taking the time and coming before the committee.

M. Polak: Just a quick question. You mentioned a sort of backlash response with respect to immigrants seeking either assistance or free funding for English-as-a-second-language programs. I'm aware through some of my past experiences that that is quite common. People commonly say: "My goodness, they came to this country. They should do that themselves."

Many are not aware of the tremendous costs to immigrants to immigrate to Canada. How do you propose that we engage in educating the public around that? If we were to offer services and expand them, the natural reaction is: why should taxpayers pay for it? How do we get that message out?

Y. Chard: I just think there is probably a lot of research done on the value of immigrants. Maybe more press releases should be going out. Somehow the word gets out of the value and maybe of the comparisons of what is spent on immigrants in B.C. compared to the rest of the country. Some people will be negative till they die, unfortunately.

D. Routley: Perhaps the entire public body benefits from the success of immigrants and their integration into our communities and economies, so that would be the reason for us all paying for that benefit.

You spoke, Ms. Chard, about the basic levels and the slow progress that students make in basic levels of literacy. There's a young gentleman in the audience who may or may not speak. He's a bit nervous. But in speaking to him, he communicated to me that new immigrants often can't understand the instructions they're given in a basic literacy program and that perhaps we need to recruit more teachers from those various multicultural communities that exist in our society to be trained to deliver literacy programs to people of their own native tongue. How do you feel about that?

Y. Chard: Well, I know the ELSA program couldn't maintain classes in some parts of the province, and they've gone to a volunteer tutoring program similar to what Literacy B.C. has in some places. In our own school we used to have 40 volunteers at any time. We're down to seven, so there are fewer people volunteering than there were ten years ago.

D. Routley: But maybe beyond volunteers, should we be training people as instructors who come from those various first languages that present themselves as immigrants?

D. Thorne: During the day and in some of the other hearings we've had over the past few months, there's been a variety of opinions on the whole idea of a literacy secretariat. This was referred to in the last briefing. Do you have any feelings on that, one way or the other? I notice you have quite a bit in your paper about the overlap and the confusion, generally.

Y. Chard: Yeah. It's probably even more confusing to us than to the learners. I mean, I heard it in a presentation two weeks ago from the Ministry of Advanced Education that they're having changes, and they don't fully understand what the changes are. I think there's a need for a lot of those programs. In some places the college is the answer. In some places the school district is the answer. Some people like to go to a college. Some people like to go to a neighbourhood literacy program. Cominco has a wonderful program in a workplace in Trail.

I think we need to have all of those agencies, but I think someone needs to know what they all are and where some are missing. Studies have been done on where we're missing in ESL. I've mentioned that in my paper too.

D. Thorne: So you would support some kind of coordinating — not necessarily a big bureaucracy, but even one person who was responsible and knew everything that was happening, and the buck stops with that person, or whatever.

Y. Chard: If that person had an independent view of all the things that are happening and wasn't biased to any one of those agencies, I think it would be very helpful.

D. Thorne: What I've been hearing is that it doesn't have to be a fancy secretariat or whatever, but we need something, because people don't know where to go — even myself, as a member of this committee. You're referring here to other submissions by people. I mean, there's a whole raft of information, and we want to be careful not to reinvent the wheel.

Y. Chard: We had the Premiers' summit, with their committee, and we have this group, and in two weeks we have a CMEC, which is the meeting in Prince George. And I'm thinking: why are we getting all these different agencies? Shouldn't somebody be pulling it all together?

R. Lee: You encouraged us to establish the ELSA four and five program. Right now, level three — you mentioned this. As a matter of fact, right now it's offered. What were the criteria you envisaged for the students?

Y. Chard: Some of the other provinces have four and five, so B.C. gets jealous. In some areas I don't think it's essential. I think that in some areas students are going from an ELSA three into some kind of a literacy program or paid ESL program, but that's mostly in the lower mainland. There are people in some of the regions, especially through the ELSA Net system, who are very, very distressed because they have nowhere to send people when they finish level three — nowhere. So some of our people in ELSA Net feel very strongly that we've got to try to get four and five, especially in those areas where there's nothing else.

Our next presenter is the Invergarry Learning Centre. We have with us Lee Weinstein and Virginia Campbell. Welcome to both of you. Please proceed.

L. Weinstein: Thank you. I am very pleased to have the opportunity to present my perspective on literacy. My name is Lee Weinstein, and for 20 years I've been the principal and founder of the Invergarry Learning Centre. Invergarry is the Surrey school district adult education facility. We teach up to 1,500 adult students per year.

I would guess that Invergarry has touched as many as 50,000 individuals and families in the Surrey area over its 20 years of operation. We provide assistance to adults who come back to school in order to gain their grade 12 adult Dogwood certificate. Many, many of our learners have either dropped out of school, never went to school or were in the process of mastering English because they were not English-speaking born — all in order to get high school graduation. All of these folks want only to improve their own lives and the lives of their families.

I know this committee is focused on understanding successful literacy strategies for promotion for adults, aboriginal people, ESL adults and seniors. I am here

today with a student from Invergarry, Virginia Campbell. Virginia's story is an important one to hear. Every individual's struggle to become literate is different. As no two people are the same, no two experiences are the same.

Before I introduce Virginia, it is important for me only to say the following. Adults need access to literacy and ABE classes. They need to know that they are welcome in those places. Within that welcoming atmosphere adults must know, individuals must know, that they are valued and that they are in a safe place to learn. No matter what the literacy methodology or strategy, we can never assist men and women to become more literate unless they know they will not be shamed or embarrassed as a result of their decision to return to school.

I'd like to introduce Virginia. I'm very proud that she's here. It took a tremendous amount of courage for her to be here today. I'm very appreciative. I know you are too.

V. Campbell: Everyone's life tells a different story. Mine started in a small community called Black Creek just outside of Campbell River. I spent the first 11½ years in my family home with four brothers and two sisters. My parents neither encouraged nor allowed us to attend school. My older brother would study with his friends and then teach us. I grew up not knowing how to read and write.

I ran away from home at 11½ years old. I hitchhiked and lived from Courtenay to Chilliwack. I stayed….

V. Campbell: I stayed with people along the way. Eventually, events in my life drew me back to home.

L. Weinstein: I'll finish this for you — okay? I just want you to listen to it.

V. Campbell: I took the bus from home in Langley. I called Lee from Surrey's transit station. He came and picked me up. The date was September 26, 2005. I am presently in adult basic education at Invergarry. I am studying reading, writing and math. Initially I had problems attending class regularly because the bus route near my home was moved. Whenever I missed, I would get a call from Lee asking if things were all right. I told him about my bus problems, and a teacher volunteered to pick me up. I was then able to attend.

Asking for help has always felt shaming. At work, asking for help often resulted in me being let go. At Invergarry, asking for help is different. It is what I am supposed to do. It is encouraged and responded to with support. As it turns out, this is what successful learners do.

My life has changed drastically in the last five months. For example, I feel confident, for the first time in my life, to leave notes that everyone can see and understand. I feel privileged to represent myself and all adult students at Invergarry. The effort we make, with the support of the teachers, means more than survival. It means independence. It means success for life. It means hope for the future. To be given the chance to finally fit into society is a blessing I can't express in words. It means no longer having to isolate myself from the world.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Virginia. Before I invite questions, let me just make this very quick remark. Virginia, this committee's purpose is for cases like yours, as to finding out how our government, our province and our people can best help each other to achieve the goals that each one of us sets for ourselves. Thank you for coming. Thank you for sharing your story.

M. Polak: First, a quick comment. I have an 18-year-old daughter who went through similar things, and do you know what? You're going to be fine. You've got good people around you, and they all support you, and you're willing. You're going to be fine.

I want to ask you something I asked my daughter, because it fascinates me. You go through years of an aimless kind of life. If you could point to one difference in how these people approached you as compared to others in the past, what worked? What tipped the balance?

V. Campbell: There's no judgment. I feel no judgment from them. I think, growing up, there's always been judgment from people who just stereotyped me into something that I can't be stereotyped into. I think

that's the difference, and there's a lot more support here than I've ever had before. It makes me know I can do it.

D. Thorne: Thank you, Virginia. You're very brave to keep going there. Every one of us has been in that position in some point in our lives, where we're just too scared to do public speaking. You're so happy later when you know that you picked up and finished it. So it's terrific.

I have a question for Lee. I'm assuming that the Surrey school district funds your learning centre?

L. Weinstein: Through provincial funding the Surrey school district is able to support adult education in Surrey — yes.

D. Thorne: Okay, that's what I'm getting at. It comes out of the adult education budget — does it? Or…?

D. Thorne: Yes, it comes out of the…. You probably don't even care about where it comes from as long as you get funding every year — right?

D. Thorne: I mean, is it separate funding from the school district funding for adult education? So it's the school board that makes the decision to fund Invergarry?

L. Weinstein: The school board makes the decision to allocate those moneys and to support the work that happens. Yeah, they support the work that happens through the Ministry of Education in the end.

Because it sounds like a really big program — 1,500 students a year — what I'm also wondering is: do you have to turn anyone away?

L. Weinstein: Well, Virginia really does this for herself. All we do is assist that to happen.

We cannot serve many potential students in Surrey. Primarily, I believe we can't serve students who are low-level English language learners, because they're in a bit of a box. And we are in a bit of a box to assist them now that the ELSA program has kind of changed some focus, changed deliverers.

We don't have as easy a time being as inclusive as we'd like to. We are as inclusive as we can be, but there's always a limitation. I mean, we can't do everything, and we can't serve everybody, even though we'd like to.

D. Thorne: So you focus more on English-as-a-first-language students rather than…?

L. Weinstein: No. We have a lot of students who have struggled to learn English to the point that they can then progress towards high school graduation. They sacrifice tremendous things to come to the school. We're open at night. They sacrifice their time at night. They work long shifts, and they then come at night. We try to be as flexible as possible. We do what we can, but I think we can do more if we were…. It's all about support.

D. Thorne: It is a unique program. I'm from Coquitlam. They don't have a comparable program to the learning centre? CABE wouldn't compare.

L. Weinstein: I'm not sure what Coquitlam has. I think Invergarry is somewhat unique. Surrey's approach to adult education has always been aggressive and supportive and, I think, taking risks. We have programs at many different places because that's where the need is. We go to try to meet the need.

D. Thorne: I'm certainly going to look into the programs in Surrey. I'm very interested in what you're doing. Thank you, all, very much.

L. Mayencourt: I just want to also congratulate you, Virginia. Is that Corrina?

J. Rustad: Before taking on this job, before being given this job by the electorate, I had a job being a school trustee. One of the things I always did was attend the adult education graduations at our continuing learning centre. I heard many stories. Many students, from all ages, have shared — from seniors in their 70s straight through to teens.

I just want to say that your story is touching. I want to thank you very much for sharing what you have shared here today and also for having the courage to come up and share. I think it speaks very well of the program. It actually speaks very well for you as well. Thank you very much.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Lee, for the good work that you are doing. Please do continue touching so many lives that you are touching.

Corinna, our acknowledgment and congratulations for helping a friend. Thank you.

Our next presenter is the Surrey Teachers Association, represented by Lynda Toews.

L. Toews: I have written up some notes and some recommendations. I'm speaking on behalf of my col-

leagues in the adult education program in Surrey. I've been teaching in that program since 1985. I currently work at Invergarry, but I spent many years before that in the ELSA program at Newton, which is better know as Princess Margaret — the Newton adult learning centre.

There are many programs, both community- and institution-based programs, around the province that serve adults. The programs, however, that I'm most familiar with are those that are either college- or school district–based. What I would like to say first of all is that those programs serve a unique need. The community-based programs are great, and we need more of them. No question — we need more of them in Surrey. But we also need more of the programs like the Invergarry Learning Centre and the Kwantlen adult basic education centre, although I shouldn't speak for them since I don't work there. They do very fine work as well.

The funding for adult education programs was capped. That is to say, the enrolment was capped, and I have put in my paper that it was '96, but I'm not positive that's the year. It may have been '97 — '97, my boss tells me. Since that time there has been some alleviation of that cap, in the sense that some districts are not using their full entitlement under the cap of enrolment, so some other districts are able to make use of that.

However, that's not the same as knowing that if you attract an adult learner, if you identify an adult learner who needs an adult basic ed program, you'll get funding for that student. The fact that there has been a cap in place for a number of years has put very regressive pressure on the Surrey school district in particular. I don't know the extent to which it has had that effect in other areas, but Surrey continues to grow.

Unlike many other areas of the province we continue to grow, continue to have increasing population, and at the same time our funding levels are capped at pre-'97 levels. Even if we can attract more students, which it's not that difficult to do, we can't provide programs for those students. So that has a very negative effect on the programs, and it means, for example, that we can't provide the same range or an improved range of programs. Our programs tend to be very centralized. All of the programs that the school district offers are between 72nd Avenue and — let me see, the furthest north would be Queen Elizabeth — 96th Avenue.

We don't have much out in the Cloverdale area. There are learning centres there, but they are learning centres that are really directed towards youth. They will take some adult students, but the main adult programs are really in the centre part of Surrey. Surrey is a huge place and continues to grow. We really need to be able to branch out in order to meet the needs of all the learners that exist here.

In addition, prior to '97 the funding that was available for additional supports — that is, the kind of funding that used to exist for special ed and for ESL — was taken away. It wasn't worked into the FTE amount because it had been removed prior to the time that the cap was introduced. That means that we don't have an ability to identify adult special needs students. Of course, we try to meet students where they are and to serve their needs as they present themselves, but we don't have the same kind of resources and support for adult special needs students as they might have in the K-to-12 system.

Let me say one more thing, backing up on what Yvonne Chard said earlier. Because I taught in the ELSA program, I did learn that many students who had taken English in their first country, prior to coming to Canada, would test into the ELSA program at about level three, which is about grade five from our perspective. She said grade four; it's probably the same level.

They would test in at about that level, level three, which means they get a limited number of hours in the ELSA program, and then they're out on their own. That's supposed to be sufficient to get them to work. If grade five were sufficient to get people to work, we would finish our education system at grade five. It's not sufficient. There is a gap between grade five and grade ten, where people could get into other training programs, or grade 12, where they can go to post-secondary. That gap needs to be addressed.

Two more things. A few years ago, in 2002, the regulations for recipients of social assistance changed such that people on social assistance were required to look for work and were not allowed to register in an education program of any kind during the day. That had a huge impact on the learners that we serve at Invergarry. We had, for example, anecdotally, a student tell her teacher that she would have to return to prostitution in order to finish her grade 12. In addition, we had students drop out with less than a month to go before their grade 12 graduation.

When you're on social assistance, you only get a limited amount of money, and you don't have extra savings to hold you over another month to be able to finish your diploma. That's a very critical thing. It's difficult enough. It's incredibly difficult for people to attend an adult learning centre. They have kids; they have families. They often have work responsibilities or other responsibilities.

It's very time consuming to be poor. It's very stressful, and that has an impact on their learning. So the minimum amount of support for people to live, in order to learn, is required for adult learning programs.

D. Thorne: You're speaking about Invergarry as well, and I was just asking Lee about the same kind of thing. We've been hearing from presenter after presenter that the support system for people to be able to attend these programs seemingly appears to be an even bigger need at the moment than having more programming. The programming is often there — I don't know about across the province, but certainly across southern British Columbia where we've been having hearings. It sounds as if that's what you're saying as well — that people have these many, many needs. I know that reading Virginia's paper here, the teacher offered to pick her up. It may have been you.

D. Thorne: She needed transportation. Unfortunately, you can't do that for 1,500 students a year, or even ten. There's just not the capability.

If you can add anything to that, I would be grateful. It's something we're going to have to look seriously at. It wasn't what I expected to hear, but it makes a lot of sense.

L. Toews: There are a couple of things. First of all, Virginia lives in eastern Surrey, close to the Langley border actually — not far. If we had more programs throughout Surrey — as I said earlier, we're kind of centralized in terms of the adult programs — it would be much easier for her to attend if there were one closer to her home.

Secondly, I think that the situation with respect to public transit…. In the widening of the Fraser Highway, they cut the bus route. It's amazing to me that they would not provide alternative routes to serve the same area, but in fact that's what happened, so it's quite a huge trek for her to make it to the nearest bus stop to be able to come here. It takes her about an hour and a half a day each way.

M. Polak: This one is the tough question. Whether we're in government or out of it, we all have ideas about what policy changes we'd love to see. If you were to pick one that you think would be the most substantial change that government can make toward the success of adult learners, particularly with respect to literacy — as a policy change, not necessarily a funding change but a legislative change — what would it be?

L. Toews: Well, it's difficult to say. There are two that I would like to identify.

L. Toews: Okay. Two. First of all, this would require funds, but I would say that the most important thing would be that people on social assistance or employment insurance, for example, ought to be able to upgrade their skills while they're in that kind of interim phase. There should not be barriers to that. That would be the first one.

Secondly, the cap that I referred to should be removed. That's what I would say.

If I were given a third, I would say ESL — the situation with respect to ESL students. The ELSA program does not go far enough.

R. Lee: Just on the cap. Because the number of students across the province actually decreases several thousand a year, maybe for the next while…. Do you think the cap is really the problem there? Up to today, do you have any problem getting the allocation?

L. Toews: There are always a number of different things that interplay. For one thing, the cap was introduced before the social assistance policy change. Many of them who used to attend were on social assistance. Given that they can no longer attend our programs, the fact that we still have 1,500 students shows that the cap is holding us back.

If all of those students were still able to attend and we had no cap, we would have much, much bigger programs. I'm talking specifically about Surrey. When I talk about the cap, that has impacted Surrey in a way that it would have impacted no other district because of the growth that we have here.

R. Lee: But you also mentioned that you can use an allocated cap. I mean the position from other districts. Overall, there's a decrease. That's what I mean.

L. Toews: The problem with that is that it's not guaranteed. You don't know until after the fact whether you're going to have that funding or not. So it means that the district has to go out on a limb and start up a program. Then you find out if you get the funding after the fact. That's kind of scary.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Seeing as there is no further question, thank you very much, Ms. Toews, for taking the time in coming before the committee.

Our next presenter is from the Canadian Immigrant Settlement Sector Alliance. The person to represent that is Chris Friesen.

C. Friesen: Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this afternoon. It's an area of deep passion for me.

I'd like to start briefly by telling you about who we are, the Canadian Immigrant Settlement Sector Alliance. We are a new national organization that began around six months ago. We have an office, a secretariat in Ottawa, and our primary goal, as over 450 refugee- and immigrant-serving agencies in Canada, is to enhance the settlement outcomes of immigrants and refugees to this country.

My comments this afternoon are going to focus, of course, on the select standing committee and in particular on B.C. Last year almost 45,000 immigrants came to this province. Short of the environmental degradation occurring, nothing will be impacting this province like immigration has, is and will. Some 45,000 people last year — 86 percent landed in the lower mainland, 79 percent were from five Asian countries, and 40 percent were children and youth. This was a 21-percent increase from the previous year, 2004.

Over 50 percent didn't speak French or English. In addition to that, just under 5 percent of the total num-

ber of immigrants that came to B.C. were refugees and protected people. We know from the 2001 census data that one in four B.C. residents is foreign-born; 22 percent are visible minorities.

In the next five years and for the foreseeable future, the number of immigrants coming to this province will increase dramatically. We're talking about 60,000 to 70,000 people a year, of which 20,000 to 25,000 will be children and youth. That's half the Vancouver school district's student population — 20,000 to 25,000 children; 60,000 to 70,000 immigrants every year.

We know that one year after the Winter Olympics, all net gain in our labour market will come entirely from immigration. In 2011 all net gain in our labour market in this province will come from immigration. By 2017 — we're talking just over a decade from now — one in three B.C. residents will be foreign-born.

Why should we care? Well, immigrants are going to pay for our pensions. They're going to pay for our health care system. They're going to fund the public education system. They're going to be sitting in the Orpheum Theatre. They're going to be working in the oil and gas industry in northeastern B.C. They're going to be working at the ports. They're our future carpenters, labourers, doctors, nurses, teachers. We're talking about a fundamental change in B.C. society.

The issue is that currently half of the funding that the government of Canada provides the province in supporting the social and economic integration of immigrants in this province has remained in the consolidated general revenue fund. This is a point that the public is not aware of.

Under the Chrétien government in the mid-1990s, there was what was called "the right of permanent fee" — the landing fee, the head tax, as it was sometimes called. This $975 was created for immigrants to prepay their language and settlement services. Before they even arrived in the country, they were asked to prepay these services, their adult ESL programs.

When they arrived in B.C., what they got were opportunities to increase their English language ability to an upper beginner's level. We can discuss and debate grades three, four, five, but the fact is that B.C. lags behind the rest of the country, including the Yukon Territory, in the provision of adult ESL services. It lags behind the Yukon Territory, and I'm not making any comparison.

The available funding is there. It's not an issue of this government, because we've been rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic for a decade now. It began back with the NDP government — half the money. In fact, in the Globe and Mail on Friday, Mr. Oppal acknowledged that more than half the transfer payment for language and settlement services for immigrants settling in this province is in the consolidated general revenue fund.

The timing couldn't be better. I quote from the Globe and Mail of Friday: "Some people wait months just to start English classes. This really needs more attention from authorities." Another Sudanese newcomer: "I was panicked because I knew if I didn't study English very well, I couldn't get a good job and be able to go to college."

We have a serious crisis, and adult ESL is a key social integration factor. If an individual does not speak English, how can they socially integrate? How can they economically integrate if the boards of trade, the B.C. Business Council and the chambers of commerce are all saying that we need skilled labour in this province and we know that over 50 percent don't speak English?

We're getting calls from Fort St. John in the oil and gas industry for workers. If you're going to place an immigrant in Fort St. John, you'd better have the supports for the non-English-speaking spouse and the children.

It's not even the fact that we don't have the resources, because we do have the resources. They're coming in every year from the federal government. The reality is that they're not being allocated in the way that they should be — that is, as part of the investment on immigrants that have already paid for them and their ability to access higher-level services, higher-level adult ESL programs.

An immigrant who lands in B.C. can acquire up to an upper beginner's level of English. If they go to Manitoba, they can study so they're fully functional in English without any cost to them. If they go to Ontario or to Alberta, they can go to a level six. If they go to B.C., it's level three, and we get the second-highest number of immigrants in the country.

This is the backbone of our future, our economic and our social future. We're talking about social cohesion here. If we cannot invest properly, adequately, to support newcomers, then frankly we have really serious problems ahead of us, because the oil and gas industry fellow in Fort St. John has to communicate with his labour force in English. If we're not providing those opportunities for people, then we have very serious problems ahead of us.

I have provided some speaking notes. I've also provided an SFU research report that was issued in February 2005, which was the first comprehensive look at language and settlement services in this country. It clearly shows what is happening in B.C. and the comparison to the rest of the country. I don't think we have any choice in the matter.

The issues have been compounded year after year since the '80s, and now it's catch-up time. We have to seriously look at the issue of adult ESL and settlement supports to immigrants, because they are our future. Whether the front page of the Vancouver Sun says whatever they want to say, the reality is we're not turning back now. This is the future — 60,000 to 70,000 people. In the mid-'90s 55,000 immigrants came to this province. This is the reality, and I leave you with those notes.

M. Polak: I want to thank you especially for bringing, obviously, so much passion to this, as do I.

Tiny background. I spent a lot of years on the ESL Consortium and as a part of that group did a signifi-

cant amount of research with respect to settlement funding from Ottawa — how it's distributed across the country and where, in fact, it goes in B.C.

One of the challenges that I'm going to ask you to perhaps give some comment on was the whole issue of where funding goes versus where an immigrant ends up. They may land initially, as most do, in the eastern portion of the country and then make their way to Vancouver either shortly after or a number of years after. As a result, the vast majority of per-capita funding for immigration goes to Quebec and Ontario. Manitoba is a bit of an anomaly, because they don't get a really high percentage of immigration, so their program funding is a little bit different. Alberta has oil and gas.

If we were to compare, we'd look at Quebec, Ontario and B.C., and that's where we looked. The issue that I would ask you to talk a bit about is: given the many years that this has gone on, how do we shift the balance so that those in Ottawa understand exactly what you pointed out — that British Columbia has the second-highest number of immigrants coming here across the country? How do we make that case, because the money ain't coming from Ottawa?

C. Friesen: Well, I'm going to be very open with you, very frank. I think the time has come for the government to launch a public commission of inquiry on immigration, because the issues now…. We talk about adult ESL. We talk about one in three B.C. residents foreign-born.

I haven't even discussed the issue of immigrant children. Research from Dr. Lee Gunderson from the UBC faculty of education is pointing out a 40-percent dropout rate in ESL secondary school students, using Vancouver school board student data — 40-percent dropout rate.

M. Polak: The reason I'm asking is because we just got stats on the completion rate for ESL students, and it was actually higher than the mainstream. What's the discrepancy?

C. Friesen: The discrepancy is that when you peel back the research, the Mandarin, Cantonese and Korean students are doing very well overall in math and science, rusty a little bit on English. Social studies has to be looked at as an entire topic.

For the Tagalog speakers, the Vietnamese, the Khmer, for refugees as a whole, for Punjabi speakers, the academic achievement…. The research that's now underway and has surfaced in the last few years is pointing out serious problems for secondary students. This is not a B.C. phenomenon.

C. Friesen: This is across the country. That's why I'm saying that maybe it's time to have a public commission of inquiry on this. The issues and the problems are so enormous, and immigrants are going to be the backbone, as I said, of our economic and social fabric of this province. One in three foreign-born….

M. Polak: They're going to own the oil and gas companies that you've been talking about. They won't be working at them. They'll own them.

C. Friesen: It's staggering. One in three B.C. residents will be foreign-born in a decade.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Chris, for coming out and giving us the benefit of your experience and knowledge. A good presentation.

D. Thorne: Can I just ask one question before Chris leaves? Just a quick question. I know we're a bit behind.

D. Thorne: Chris, you pointed out from the paper what Mr. Oppal said about the money being in the consolidated fund. Did he happen to say why that was? I mean, that's kind of a stunning…. I didn't see that article, and I'm very surprised, when one of the goals of the government is literacy and ESL services.

D. Thorne: There is, and I'm going to ask that we get clarity on that for this committee. We'll make sure that we share that with you and with anyone else who's interested.

R. Lee: Ten years ago we asked that question. The answer is that part of that is actually spent on the ESL students in K-to-12, because of the immigrants — their children. For example, last year the money spent on ESL programs from K-to-12 was about $60 million, which is more than the allocation from the federal government.

C. Friesen: If that is the case, Mr. Lee, then that may be a breach of the B.C.-Canada agreement on immigration. The B.C.-Canada agreement was very clear on

what that money should go for, and it wasn't about subsidizing the K-to-12 system.

This is one of the smoke-and-mirror, cat-and-mouse games that we're not familiar with. I'm aware from a discussion with the retired dean of King Edward campus that some of that money went into higher-level, fee-for-service, adult ESL classes. If it's going somewhere, then let it be known so that the community agencies can refer to those programs.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Chris. We appreciate, once again, your being here.

B. Krieger: I'll introduce myself. I have been an adult literacy practitioner for — I added it up — 29 years in Surrey, Richmond and Langley. I work at Kwantlen University College now, by the way. I've also worked in the school board system in a program that preceded Invergarry. So I've been around quite a while. I know Lee, and I know the good work he does as well.

At any rate, I'm now a resident of Langley. As part of my work at Kwantlen I sat on the fundamental articulation committee for approximately 12 years, and for six of those years I was the chair. What the fundamental articulation committee is…. Simply, representatives of each of the colleges in the province come together and make sure that our curriculum up to the grade eight level, and that's right from literacy zero to eight, is consistent provincewide, and that happens for any post-secondary subject area, or discipline, as we call it. That's sort of lets you know what that's all about.

I also have sat on the B.C. Federation of Labour workplace literacy initiative, and we have sort of revived it. It kind of fizzled out for a while, but I'm happy to hear that we're back on track again. So that's kind of exciting.

I am coming today as a representative of the Langley Literacy Now initiative task force. We're very happy that this has been initiated and that we are one of the communities in the province that is going to receive some funding. The interesting thing is that as we looked at our community profile in Langley, we discovered that there was very little provision for adult literacy. Langley does a great job with early literacy, with primary literacy in the school system, but there's very little for adult literacy. There's ours at Kwantlen. There is Langley Education Centre, and there's a very small program at Aldergrove — so not very much available for people who live in Langley.

What I would like to do, rather than giving you a whole bunch of statistics…. I'm sure you're overwhelmed with research and all of that good stuff. There are other people that have probably done a very good job. I am just going to give you some sort of profiles of some of my learners, so you get an idea of the kind of people that we get in literacy programs. I'll use pseudonyms. Here we go.

The first person I'm going to talk about is Fred. Fred was in his 40s, maybe close to 50 in age. I'm not sure. He had attended 30 schools before he dropped out in grade eight. He was a bit of a drifter. He worked breaking horses, in agricultural labour and hard physical work, and a physical injury resulted in his inability to work. Also, alcohol abuse entered in as well. He was referred to our program by a social agency in Aldergrove. He used to ride his bike from Aldergrove to Langley campus, which is in Langley city — about 16 kilometres one way — in all kinds of weather. He was there just about every single day. His attendance was absolutely excellent.

When he came to us, he was a non-reader. He probably was functioning at about a grade two level. He could barely read, and he could barely add and subtract. That's where he started. He began the program in September, and by the end of March the following year had achieved grade eight–level skills and was making very good progress. He was awarded The Co-operators Learner Achievement Award by Literacy B.C.

However, he was told that he was unable to continue because the funding had run out. He was a social services recipient. Had he been permitted to continue for an additional three to four months, based on the kind of progress he was making, he would have achieved grade ten–level skills, which would then have allowed him to enter a trades program. Without grade ten level, they can't get into trades, so he disappeared, and I do not know what has happened to him. I have not seen him in many years.

The second person I'll tell you about is Lisa. She was in her mid-20s when she came to us. She was a young bride, and in the course of her time with us she did become pregnant. She was a community volunteer in children's craft programs. She had completed grade nine. In her family, education wasn't important; what girls did was get married. She was working in a mill as a labeller. I don't know quite what that involved, but it was basically unskilled or very low-level skilled work.

She had attempted GED and passed all the subtests except for math and writing. Her reading skills were really pretty good. When she came to us we gave her an assessment. All students who come to us in our program receive an assessment of reading, writing and math, and when we have a low reading level we often do some other subtests as well. This is not psychoedu-

cational testing or anything like it. It's just very simple listening comprehension and auditory vocabulary. But if we see a huge discrepancy between a student's reading level and what they score on these two informal tests, then we start to ask some questions.

Because of that, we referred her to an agency called ALDA, which is a non-profit organization that advocates for learning-disabled adults. They do have some limited psychoeducational testing. This young lady could not afford psycho-ed testing, so we sent her there. She tested out writing at a grade four level. Her reading was at grade ten–plus, which wasn't a surprise, and her math was at a grade six level. She worked on her weak areas for a year. She was very persistent. She could only come part-time; however, she wrote and passed the GED and was accepted into the special ed teaching assistant program at Kwantlen. Last I heard she was employed in the Langley school district as a teaching assistant. She now has three children and works part-time.

The next person I'm going to tell you about is Peter. He was in his 50s. He was an immigrant from Great Britain. He said he was always the class clown, and he hated school. He was not what you would consider a typical literacy individual — a person with literacy deficits. He was a successful independent businessman and was active in the community. He is an amateur squash and tennis player. He knew he had reading and spelling problems, but he never divulged them to anyone but his wife.

He even acquired a real estate licence. He had his wife read the material to him, and he memorized it. He gained the knowledge and vocabulary, the words that he needed for the licence, so it was very specialized reading. He could read very slowly, but he passed the exam, and math wasn't a problem, because he could use a calculator.

What happened was that he became involved in little theatre, and he could not read the scripts. He decided that he needed help, so he came to us. So that's another student.

The next one is Mark. He now is probably in his late 30s. He's an immigrant from the West Indies. He hated school, and at a young age dropped out and became a bonefish diver. He could not read or write when he came to us. He barely recognized the letters of the alphabet. He could do only simple addition and subtraction. He had been employed as a warehouseman when he suffered a back injury. He spent three years full-time in our program. Fortunately, his wife worked, and so they were able to afford it. He qualified for the outdoor power program at Kwantlen, which he successfully completed. He's now employed and, as well, has a small business running a tree farm.

The next one is Alice. Alice, when she came to us, was 18 years of age. She was a high school graduate with good marks in math and science and a "C" in English 12. She was diagnosed with a learning disability in her school years but was unable to access extra support because the range of her scores did not meet criteria for that service. She did, however, receive learning assistance in high school. She needed English 12 with a "C plus" to qualify for BCIT courses. She had the score, but she knew that her skills did not match her grades. This is the first student I've ever had who came to me and interviewed me and said: "What am I going to do in this program? I want to know."

Anyway, we gave her a standardized reading test. She tested at a grade six level. She attended the program for one and a half years, part-time, and did achieve a grade 12 equivalency. However, she still had spelling issues, and she continued for another one and a half years, part-time. She achieved a "B" on a qualifying course for first-year English and went on to BCIT.

B. Krieger: Okay. I think what I would like to do, as well, is give you some quotes from some of my learners. Here is what they have said. "It is like I've been released from a prison now that I can read." "I can now walk into a classroom without feeling physically ill." "I always sat at the back of the room and was quiet and hoped that the teacher wouldn't notice me." "I was always the model student so the teacher wouldn't notice that I couldn't do things." "I volunteered to do things so I wouldn't have to read or do math." "I had people fill out their own forms because I couldn't read them." "I had a successful bed-and-breakfast business, and I would run next door to an understanding neighbour who would help me fill out the forms." "I would say I had left my reading glasses at home and get someone else to fill out the forms." "I had my sister come with me when I knew I would have to fill out forms." "I'm not dumb after all; I always thought I was dumb."

Probably one of the most eloquent is a paraphrase of a story that a student wrote when she came for her initial assessment. She said: "I was in a bank with my toddler. He was playing with the toys." By the way, she could write quite well. "He came running over to me with a teddy bear with a logo on it. He said: 'Mommy, what does this say?' I knew that I needed help when I had to whisper to him: 'Mommy can't read it.'"

R. Lee: Thank you for sharing all those stories with us. For those people seeking help, they are coming to you. Are there any outreach programs? If there would be an outreach program, which community do you think the outreach programs should be directed to?

B. Krieger: Usually students that come to us are referred by agencies, or they don't qualify because of the trades testing. They have to have a certain reading and math level. That's what you're asking — where they're coming from or how they access our program?

B. Krieger: We don't have much of an outreach program at Kwantlen. I am very happy to say that as far as I…. Other than the program that I began in, which was an outreach from Kwantlen, there's been very little over the years because of institutional change. Because Surrey has grown so quickly and Kwantlen has grown so quickly, they just haven't had time.

We do have a program that I'm very proud of at the Whalley library which is an outreach program. It's called Word Power. Susan who came today is actually the instructor there. This was an initiative from the library. They came to us and said: "Would you partner with us?"

I would say we've had very limited community partnerships, and it's been a frustration for me. I'd see that as something that really is necessary.

M. Polak: Beverley, you describe the fact that you're part of a new initiative, and I just wondered who that was funded through.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you very much, Beverley. Seeing no other questions, I want to thank you for taking the time and coming here for us.

Our next presenter is the B.C. Adult Educators' Specialist Association, represented by Victor Guenther.

V. Guenther: I believe I have provided you with some 14 copies: a brief and then the last issue of our adult educators' journal, which contains some interesting articles concerning students' learning disabilities.

The Provincial Adult Educators' Specialist Association commends your select standing committee for its focus on adult education, literacy and related critical issues. Our PSA also has read Ms. Lynda Toews's substantive, insightful and brilliant brief and gives it their wholehearted endorsement. She's one of our past presidents, incidentally.

The Adult Educators' PSA represents 350 to 400 teachers of literacy and academic classes, publishes eight newsletters and two journals annually, conducts a professional annual conference and is active in the BCTF PSA Council. On this last Saturday we awarded two student scholarships and eight bursaries to our adult students from British Columbia.

Personally, I've taught adults for 27 years. I've taught college for five years, and I've served in situations by way of administration and taught in Chilliwack, West Vancouver, Richmond and Surrey as an adult educator. In addition, I am semi-retired, after teaching secondary students for some 35 years.

As you undoubtedly already know, 22 percent of B.C. adults aged 16 to 65 are functionally illiterate according to Canadian and international empirical studies. For B.C. that would be over 800,000 adults. Yet studies also reveal regularly that effective literacy and successful job performance are highly correlated. Therefore, it is in the government's economic — not to mention social, cultural and political — interests to give adult education and literacy a far higher priority. Hopefully, your committee's work will advance such priorities.

The need for incremental prerequisite courses. Teachers are always excited by their friendly, energetic, curious and motivated adult students who enter our classrooms every semester, but as adult educators we also regularly see students with a wide spectrum of deficits: knowledge, skills, work habits, attitudes — intellectual, emotional and cultural — and a wide range of learning disabilities.

In addition, many adult students come to communication 11 and 12 courses with perhaps only a 200- to 300-word vocabulary and a grades-four-to-six writing and reading comprehension level. The ability to speak English haltingly in social contexts is not a successful prerequisite for studying six textbooks in one semester at the grade 12 level. There are no prerequisite courses that they must take, but many teachers think there should be.

In the last ten years there has been a marked increase in the rate of participation in adult education and training, with close to or over half of adult populations enrolled in some form of organized adult education and training. In Canada the participation rate in adult education and training among those aged 16 to 65 increased from 36 percent in just 1994 to 49 percent in 2003. That's a 14-percent increase in just ten years. That's impressive.

But some school districts prefer students to drop out two or three times, as I had a principal tell me, so as to obtain three separate substantial government grants, rather than insist on adult-oriented basic literacy prerequisite courses that enable students to sustain their motivation and to be successful. If they attend four classes, the government gives a grant to the local school district. We can and must do better. Teachers would like to see it at 80 to 90 percent, but the current programs restrain such noble but attainable objectives.

Next, the need to expand course time allotments. The basic problem, as we see it, is the academic course limitation of 80 to 85 hours in some districts, while day school classes may have 115 to 120 hours. Academic teachers of adults frequently share with me the difficulty of preparing for the provincial exams within the 85 hours. However, the provincial government, we understand, grants districts resources for 100 hours of instruction. Vancouver adult educators have 85 to 90 hours of paid instruction time.

Adult continuing education should not be seen by district administrators as a cash cow to be milked aggressively and persistently. One district has made over $5 million annually on these programs, often at students' and teachers' expense and sacrifice. Adult education and literacy programs cannot be sacrificed on the

altar of entrepreneurial profit-making, even though Joseph Schumpeter would be impressed with what's happening at the school board level.

In addition, students often have no access to school libraries during night school classes and may be prevented from taking field trips either due to school district policies or because there are insufficient class hours to broaden and enrich their educational experiences.

Adults require more class hours, not fewer, than day school students who have been in our school system for perhaps 11 or 12 years. Frequently I hear teachers say that adult learners aged 19 to 50 still have many basic literacy problems, and I've just listed them. It is almost impossible to teach recent immigrant adults the grades-four-to-11 basic literacy skills in a five-month semester. I've done it, after 361 hours of work, but I got paid for 78.

In addition to overcoming the constantly alarming deficit in rudimentary literary skills, teachers of communication 11 and 12 and social studies 11 also feel that it is very necessary to have new Canadians assimilate into Canadian society with, for example, brief lesson segments, before Canadian holidays or after, about Thanksgiving, Remembrance, Christmas, Easter, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Canada Day and Labour Day, ethnicity, gender identity issues, etiquette and manners, ethics, punctuality and general social adaptation, infused with principles of respect, justice, equality and equity.

Therefore, it is abundantly clear to educators and absolutely essential that grade 12 courses have at least 105 hours. We ignore adult literacy and academic education at our society's peril — decreased productivity and slower economic growth.

In Newton, in Surrey, adult educators are also often subject to precarious working conditions, limited-time contracts and fluctuating enrolments. Nowhere is this more evident than in second language education, where teachers often face the annual tension of contract renewal. Planning, consistency and our ability to serve the needs of our learners suffer as a result.

Next, the need to extend the education year to ten months. At one adult learning centre in Surrey — namely, Invergarry — teachers work four days per week with no paid preparation or professional development time. Instead, they may take home work to do on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. These teachers work only to the end of May — June 2 this year — and hence, do not accumulate their hundred hours for pensionable purposes until the following November.

In Vancouver teachers have 950 hours, and teaching assistants get 1,250 to 1,300 hours. There must be a better way to treat and retain these teachers and to sustain their professional morale.

We're often told there are inadequate resources to meet adult needs. We've just heard from Mr. Friesen that it's far from the truth. That is fiction. The B.C. economy is flourishing, and the government coffers are overflowing. Attack the consolidated funds, we've heard. Now is the opportune time to implement much-needed adult literacy educational improvements. I'm going to omit other literacies, which deal with mathematics and the sciences, because we may have some time limitations.

Despite the large variations in adult students' learning readiness, many come to us with rich, complex social and personal backgrounds — very eager to learn and well motivated.

Next, developing modified literacy curriculum for adult learners. The students have come to us with many different issues, including language, personal and social challenges. Hence we need policies to enable teachers to make curriculum modifications for certain types of adult students. Perhaps communication 12 should not be a provincially examinable course. Some adult educators give mostly open-book tests to facilitate student success. Other teachers find this to be an unacceptable practice, but we do have teacher autonomy, and we do try to meet the students' needs in the best way we can.

The need for increased funding. At a recent conference in Toronto a B.C. adult educator was informed that the federal government had just contributed an extra $920 million to Ontario for its adult education literacy programs. Will comparable resources also be heading west shortly? We sincerely hope so. If we think education is expensive, then we should try ignorance and foster functional illiteracy.

Professional development paid release time. In contrast to secondary school teachers, who get five paid professional days per year, adult educators get no paid professional development time in some districts — for example, Surrey. Given their class compositions and their need to stay current in adult literacy research, it is urgently necessary that adult educators receive equity treatment with their day-school colleagues. Vancouver adult educators receive three paid professional days and have their separate collective agreement.

There is some research that I refer to next. I'm going to go on to the last paragraph under that heading.

Adult development and adult education continue to be intertwined. However, many adult educators are specifically trained to work in a diverse classroom that involves not only immense life experiences but also age differences that cover a life span. How many adult educators are knowledgable in recognizing, understanding and working comfortably with adults who have learning disabilities? Yet there are adult educators in B.C. who can attend professional development conferences to find the answers to such questions if they are given paid release time.

Next, preparation and marking time. Equally important is the fact that some adult educators receive no paid preparation and marking release time, while secondary day-school teachers currently receive 12½ percent. To my knowledge, only Vancouver teachers get paid preparation time.

Literacy and English teachers often spend hundreds of hours of their weekends marking papers to give adult students that extra practice needed to suc-

ceed. When one considers a communication 12 class of 30 students, 60 percent of whom are reading and writing at the grade four to six level — which the teacher seeks to bring to grade 11 and 12 in five months — students are amazed, but 66 marked assignments and 100 hours of unpaid marking time can create impressive results.

However, is it fair and reasonable to expect this of our teachers? Some teachers feel the biggest thieves in the province are districts, who take advantage of teachers' humanism and caring concern, extracting unpaid time and energy from already overburdened and selfless teachers.

Several years ago on a Saturday I attended a professional development seminar given by a B.C. director of adult education, whose advice to us was: successful adult educators just reduced the course content to 85 hours and still covered all the material on the final exam, and our district scores went up. Literacy, like, for example, communication 12…. Only 40 percent is tested on the final examination, but I also owe my students a professional responsibility to teach the other 60 percent of the course.

Currently a strong "C plus" grade nine student can pass the reading comprehension and writing sections, because about 50 percent of the exam is multiple choice. Some weak students do not even attempt the 24-mark essay and can still pass the course, while new Canadians face great linguistic challenges.

There now follows an experience I had at St. George's School, which is an interesting contrast to adult education in Surrey. I would like to just go on to the final paragraph.

The mind is analogous to a parachute. It works effectively only when open. Thus, we will genuinely reform adult education only when we are cognizant of students' needs, abilities, learning disabilities and learning strategies as well as of teachers' unreasonably heavy burden in discharging their professional responsibilities. Every day teachers of adults use their professional expertise to meet regular and immigrant students' diverse learning needs so that they will remain lifelong learners, participate responsibly in our democratic processes and become fully assimilated into our laudable multicultural society.

The recommendations. Therefore, the Adult Educators' PSA of British Columbia recommends:

(2) that adult students be screened so as to be admitted only to literacy and English courses for which their knowledge and skills have prepared them;

(3) that additional fundamental courses be taught so that more students can be successful in their first attempt at a grade 12 government examination course;

(4) that teachers in adult literacy and academic day and evening courses be given the same preparation and marking and release time as their day-school colleagues;

(5) that adult educators be provided with paid professional development time commensurate with their day-school counterparts;

(6) that educators in adult educational learning centres be assigned, wherever possible, 1,000 hours of instructional time between September and June 30 of each school year;

(7) that substantial increased funding be allocated annually to the adult education and literacy programs in British Columbia to provide for these recommendations.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Victor, let me, on behalf of the committee, thank you for taking the time in coming before us today.

Our next presenters are Servants Anonymous Society of Surrey, represented by Lynda Dickson.

L. Dickson: Good afternoon. You'll have to bear with me. This is one of the first groups that I've had an opportunity to sit in front of in this type of a forum, and now I know how some of my students felt a couple weeks ago when they participated in a forum on homelessness in Surrey.

The Servants Anonymous Society has been operating for about five years in Surrey. You have a brochure in front of you that tells you a little bit about the society and its mission statement. We're involved in the community. Geographically we're located just off of Highway 10, very close to the Langley border — 177th and…. Where are we?

L. Dickson: There we go — 57th Avenue. We've actually just recently started as part of the Adopt-a-Street program in that area, so we're out there getting a street look, definitely, at the community.

The problems associated with adult literacy at our centre chiefly have to do with the fact that our learners are women and youth that are victims of violence, including human trafficking and sexual exploitation. As we have heard from the rest of the presenters this afternoon, there's a very strong link between literacy and homelessness and poverty. The adult learners that we are attempting to serve in our centre are very much in this segment of the population.

I have a background in and am pursuing my masters in adult ed at UBC with a minor in psych. I have a community counselling background in Langley, actually, and I've been an HR literacy consultant for several independent companies in the past.

One of the things that led me to the Servants Anonymous Society was a practicum situation that I provided for one of the students when I was at Sprott-Shaw College. One of the things that struck me there at the college was the HRDC learners that came through the program there that really were not prepared for that type of a delivery system. They had very poor skills. Just being able to communicate was difficult for them. Showing up on time was difficult. They face a lot of issues that we don't really think about when we

think of students attending a program. They're adults, certainly. But if they have drug and alcohol issues and they started when they were 11, 12 or 13 with those types of addictive behaviours, then very likely, even though chronologically they may be in their late 20s, cognitively they're still 12, 13. They bring those issues into the classroom.

They're very difficult learners to reach in many ways. They have self-esteem issues. They have different deficits with regards to cognitive impairment. In addition to their drug and alcohol, they may have fetal alcohol syndrome, ADD, post–traumatic stress disorders. Certainly, some of our women who have been violently assaulted have many of those types of things in addition to lacking in social skills.

Our 2004 Solicitor General Communities Safety and Crime Prevention Award, I think, highlighted the fact that we're very effective in community. Some of the stumbling blocks that we find with regards to delivery of education to these women is that there's very little funding for learners to access basic transportation. That was discussed by some of my colleagues in the past.

Reading materials and food — primary psychological needs. If we look at Maslow's triangle, we find that those safety and security needs and basic survival needs are at the very bottom of that triangle. I just would like to make it very clear that we're talking about trying to deliver an education-based system which…. You know, that cognitive level is five up from that bottom. So we are constantly looking at situations daily where we're just trying to assist the ladies in finishing off their GED program. Jennifer's story here earlier today was not uncommon to those that we hear every day from women in our program.

With 2010 coming, it's interesting to me that we're a major tourist destination, always popular for Whistler, Long Beach and a lot of ecotourism, and we're also accepted as an epicentre for the child sex trade in Canada, with over 100,000 transactions for sexual activities per day happening in this province. That number is appalling to me. Appalling more so is the fact that we've been advised by the B.C. police chiefs and others that work with the Joint Missing Women Task Force that that number is very, very low. If they actually reported the accurate number, we would sit back and go, "That's ridiculous," and discount it and so therefore invalidate a lot of the programs that are out there.

WISH is supported by Capilano College. There was a project done in 2001 — you're familiar with that, Mary? — on literacy for women on the streets. One of the recommendations that came out of that paper was that those who advocate on behalf of this group and attempt to deliver programs have to be very aware of the fact that the deliverables have to be relevant and relate directly to the context in which these women live their day-to-day lives. That's a little difficult sometimes to fit into your typical ABE programs.

We do offer that ability for the women at the centre. The challenge there is to think on your feet and say: "Well, the reason why this formula is important is that if you wanted to divide your household budget in such a way that you could provide Kraft dinner for your kids for the next few weeks, then when you sit there and you do your shopping, this is why you would need to know how to do long division." You need to get that basic with them.

Then I was thinking about the fact that literacy for them is quite different than how most of us view literacy. Literacy for them is about health literacies — where to go for information on safe sex. All of a sudden, if you've got a hygiene problem, and it has developed into something a little bit more major, how to figure out where to go that's safe and non-judgmental to find out what that might be. These youths don't have access to that information.

We feel that women are the cornerstone of the family and the key to the next generation of learners. We try and assist them at the centre, one woman and one youth at a time.

We feel that as a result of a lot of reports like the report on the needs of the poor that was done in Vancouver in 2001 — provided by the city team ministries and WHAM — in Surrey we're looking at very large numbers of single-parent women: 62 percent in Surrey versus the GVRD number of 54 percent. We're quite concerned that there's 70 percent of commercial child sex exploitation in B.C. in the Vancouver area.

I think it's interesting that B.C. has a history of incredible adult education programs. Certainly, Frontier College, whose home is now at Britannia, first went to the streets in the mining and forestry camps to bring greater literacy, social and academic, to those isolated workers. I feel that we're on a new frontier here with the homeless and the working poor.

I would just like this panel and others to consider the fact that when we're talking about literacy, sometimes it goes beyond the deliverables that a lot of you are involved in. I just would like the committee to note that when you receive submissions from those that work in the tertiary areas that our need is just as great, and that we represent women who can't speak for themselves, who wouldn't want to speak for themselves and who need our help the most.

M. Polak: Lynda, I know that some years ago…. I was trying to think when it was. It seems to me it was '99, but it might have been 2001. The Surrey school district, along with others, did a study with respect to social equity funding — in other words, provincial funding that flowed to various social equity programs that would support people in need, poverty and all the rest of that — to determine whether or not there was comparable funding being received south of the Fraser as opposed to north of the Fraser region.

At that time it was determined that south of the Fraser received one-third the amount of funding for a comparable demographic. I wonder if you have any knowledge with respect to whether or not that allocation has shifted. Has it become more fair, or is it still something in need of addressing?

L. Dickson: I'm sorry. I don't have the stats to accurately respond to that.

M. Polak: In a general sense, then, do you feel that south of the Fraser is receiving comparable support to communities that have traditionally been viewed as more urban? Are we catching up to that?

L. Dickson: I would say not, just from my work with SAS. Now I've only been with them since last November, but in looking at my other teaching experiences…. I've been over at Invergarry, and I've looked at situations in Langley and certainly out in Chilliwack, and those areas probably receive a lot more funding from private donors. I think a lot more people get on the bandwagon the farther out the valley you go. There are a lot of religious organizations that are happy to step in and provide additional funding where the provincial funding falls off.

The other issue for us, too, is that sometimes provincial funding from certain areas has restrictions which don't serve the learners that we're delivering the program to. By that, I mean that oftentimes we can only receive funding for a certain period of time or for a specific type of learner, and our learners fall outside of that. So we do have some issues there.

I thought it was quite interesting that my learners, though, in returning from the symposium on the plight of the homeless…. Their biggest fears in going there were their language skills, their dress. The information-sharing might feel a little exploitive, again, for them. They wondered to what end that whole process was, so we discussed that as part of our discussion on social literacy and the importance of their feedback.

I loved it that one learner came back wondering if the panel participants' literacy levels were increased as a result of them partaking. It's interesting that out of these mouths sometimes come the most amazing comments, and it reminds me that my work, daily, is not about fixing things that are broken. It's about polishing off the silver.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Good expression. Thank you very much for coming and sharing your time and expertise.

L. Mayencourt: A lot of the programs that you're offering here — I read this brochure — are very close to some that are offered by a society called Helping Spirit in Vancouver. Would you like to connect with them?

L. Dickson: Yes, I would very much like to connect with them. I know that our program is quite unique. I'm familiar with how far the WISH project goes and the programs that are offered by PEERS and some of the other organizations downtown on the east side. But our program, to the best of my knowledge, deals with women who are wanting to exit the trade and are wanting a safe place to go to, whereas some of those programs are certainly street-level programs that offer some very worthwhile supports, both health and education. But these women are wanting to leave that area, and that's the difficulty for them sometimes — for themselves and their children.

L. Mayencourt: That's what this one does, except it's geared more towards first nations women, but it's on the same level as what you're talking about.

L. Dickson: We take only 20 percent from government, because again, the issue there is the restrictions with regards to how long we can keep some women in the program and what happens after a certain period of time if they've been referred to us by Social Services or whatever. Sometimes their welfare money doesn't kick in, and we have to give them some funds until that happens.

In some cases some of the women are only allowed to stay with us for a certain period of time, and then they have to leave. Our program tries to look more towards corporate donors and private funders for some of those reasons.

I must apologize to you, Richard, for the delay. As you know, we have been running a little bit behind, and I thank you for your patience in staying through with us.

I'm not here for any particular reason other than to advocate for difficult children and my child in particular. He was first diagnosed as having a problem when he was approximately three years of age, and the treatment for his problem was speech therapy.

I said to the doctors: "Where do you go for speech therapy?" Well, you go to your local health unit, and after you become school age, it becomes the responsibility of the school board to provide therapy for your child. So we went to the health unit. This is all old stuff, but I don't think things have changed too much. Go to the health unit and get your child's name on a wait-list. A year later you're still waiting on a wait-list, and then you start asking some more pointed questions, and you find out there's not even a therapist on staff. Two years of his life wasted on speech therapy.

Then the child goes into the public school system. The first thing is you're getting a phone call from the teacher: "Has your child ever been assessed?" Well, doctors from Sunny Hill hospital assessed him. Where is the assessment? It's gone. So I'm down one evening with the principal photocopying all these assessments, and they're given to the school teacher.

The assessment to the school, speech pathologist and the doctors at Sunny Hill hospital is intensive speech therapy. In September there's no speech ther-

apy. In October there's no speech therapy. November it starts. I'm intervening with the speech therapist, and I said: "Well, why aren't you starting my child's speech therapy?" "Oh, I'm doing assessments." So I said: "Well, he's already been assessed." "Who assessed him?" "The doctors at Sunny Hill hospital assessed him." "We do not recognize the doctors from Sunny Hill hospital. We do our own assessments."

The first big slap in the face. All that time was wasted, and all that money was wasted on assessments which are not even recognized. We found out right there and then that one ministry does not tell another ministry how to treat children.

Yes, we did get some speech therapy that year, and I was actually pretty pleased. They gave him one session every week for the first year of school, one 20-minute session a week. Then the following year they reduced it from one session a week to now a group setting and even less time.

I phoned the Ministry of Education and told them what was going on. The Ministry of Education told me point blank that what they're doing is a violation of the School Act. They are not to be reducing services to your child unless they tell you via the IEP what is going on. The only reason the ministry will accept the school district reducing services is to tell the parent that they're wasting time and energy on this program. I've reviewed all my child's IEPs, and every one of them said how well he's improving, but they reduced services.

So how does a parent hold a school district accountable to the School Act? I don't know. There's no way. I couldn't do it.

Now, the third year I don't think there was any speech therapy at all. But the third year he's got some behavioral problems and what have you. He's running around the classroom, and he's got frustrated. He can't communicate properly. So the school teacher decides to tie him up to the chair. A very sensitive issue, but it became part of the school's policy that either I give permission to the school teacher to tie him up, or he'd be sent home from school.

This is a difficult child. The parents at home are burning out trying to get him to school. Here's the school threatening to expel him because he's got behavioral problems. Anyway, for behaviour modification they're starting to put him into this restraining harness three times a day only on days that it's raining, ten minutes each time. So it's ten minutes in the morning, ten minutes at lunchtime and ten minutes at recess in the afternoon. On days when it's not raining, they set him outside.

We, at the same time, were seeing a registered clinical psychologist, and he was trying to give us some strategies on how to deal with him at home. I bring him this note from the school teacher saying she's tying up my child at school. He told me to put a stop to it, because that teacher is doing harm to my child.

I went back to the school teacher, and I asked her: "What training do you have to tie my child up?" She said that when she took her teaching degree, she got some courses on behavioral management, and she knows what she is doing.

So I go back to my registered clinical psychologist. I'm paying him $137 an hour, and he specializes in difficult children. Again, he told me that she is not qualified to do what she is doing. "Put a stop to it. And keep your child in school."

We had to go to the press. I filed a human rights complaint against the Abbotsford school board trustees. The B.C. Human Rights Council did a two-year investigation on the use of this restraining device on my child, and the ruling came down that it does not violate a child's human rights to be tied up. That's the ruling. As long as the parents are aware it's going on and have given permission, even under duress, that's the ruling.

The Ministry of Education uses section 43 of the Criminal Code to protect children from being abused. Section 43 of the Criminal Code permits parents and acting parents to tie up their children and even to assault their children. I talked to one prosecutor who tried to lay charges against a school teacher for hitting a child so hard that it knocked out teeth. They took that to court, and they lost. Hitting a child so hard, hitting out teeth is not considered excessive force under section 43 of the Criminal Code. Tying a child to a chair with electrician's tape is not considered excessive force under section 43 of the Criminal Code.

You write to Ottawa on these cases, and Ottawa writes you back, saying: "Do not look at the Criminal Code of Canada for legislation to protect children. It is the responsibility of the provincial government to write legislation to prevent children from being abused."

There is nothing under the School Act that protects a child from being abused. When you are a parent and you're phoning the child protection branch and telling them that the abuse is going on in school, they are extremely reluctant to investigate inside another ministry. Again, one ministry will not tell another ministry how to treat children.

The Ministry of Social Services, working with our family then and now and with our child, who is now an adult, is bending over backwards. When I tell the professionals from the social services that they were tying up the children, they said: "That's against the law." I said: "That's what you think." That's what we all think — that it's against the law — but it's not. This ruling from the B.C. Council of Human Rights saying that it does not violate a child's human rights to tie them up clears the way for the provincial government to sit down and put into policy the rules for the use of restraints on children, including drugging children at school.

Children being sent out of the classroom and sitting in the hallway — because little Joey's been misbehaving — is a form of restraint. Whenever a child is put into seclusion, that's a form of restraint. How many minutes can the child sit in the hallway? The guidelines are for just a few minutes, and the child must be under adult supervision somewhere else in the school.

I asked around. I asked: "Well, what has to happen for a child to be considered as receiving an education? What is the minimum that has to happen?" Just be there. No teachers are required. No principals are required. No special education experts are required. It took a long time for me, putting pressure on all the different psychologists, even to get my child assessed. My opinion of the education system, for my difficult child — he's difficult — is very poor. Yeah, it's very poor.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Richard, for sharing that quite heartrending story.

R. Stock: The province of British Columbia does not have a restraint policy — period. There are no rules — period — for tying up children at school. I have talked to parents who've had their children in the padded rooms, in Surrey school district here, for the whole day. The school teacher is now writing a report to the parents saying that the child's behaviours are even worse instead of getting better.

They are doing harm to these children. There needs to be some intervention from some child professionals, some people with doctorate degrees on how to deal with these difficult children.

There was one case, I also read in the newspaper, where a child would be locked into this blacked-out room. A school psychologist sees this and opens the door of this blacked-out room. The psychologist gets herself fired for interfering.

Certain school districts have a restraint policy; certain school districts do not have a restraint policy. The School Act states that a principal has powers similar to those of a parent. If the principal can tie up children, so can I. I go to the child protection branch. When I talk to them, they say: "You don't start tying up your child at home, or we'll apprehend. We'll keep him, and you'll fight in court to get him back. It's going to cost you about $75,000." They're right. They'll break you.

The teachers have got their union behind them. If they're going to charge them with this, they're going to have to fight this. But they will win, because there's no legislation there.

The B.C. Ombudsman's office was very critical of the child protection branch for failure to investigate allegations of child abuse at school. There's nothing there. There needs to be some provincial legislation on this matter.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Richard. Seeing no questions, I want to thank you on behalf of the committee for coming before us and sharing your story.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Your comments have been recorded, and when the committee does prepare its final report….

R. Stock: I've made the same report before in the year 2002 — not one reply. This file can be judiciously reviewed by a court — the human rights file — to compound into legislation, but it's very expensive to do that kind of stuff.

The province of British Columbia is signatory to the United Nations to give children rights. What are the child's rights when they're being tied up? That's the question. They don't have rights. They're considered property.

M. Fazeli: Good afternoon. I am a new immigrant from Afghanistan. I wrote my understanding of the problem of ESL students in an essay. I'd like to go through this essay.

English for the new immigrants to Canada is the first step toward integration into their new country. It is the reason for founding the ELSA and ESL programs by the governments in different levels: beginner, intermediate, advanced and college preparation.

Unfortunately, the beginner-level courses are not always effective for the new adult immigrants as they try to establish a base for their development in learning English. Also, the native languages of the students play a significant role in their progress in English. There are common problems for all language groups. As an immigrant from Afghanistan I think that for most of the new adult Afghan immigrants who arrive in Canada without a minimum, basic English and who start it here, the beginner-level courses are mostly ineffective.

The new Afghan immigrants can be divided into three groups: those who are illiterate in their own language, the group with a basic ability of primary reading and writing in their own language, and the group with formal education. According to my observation, the beginner-level courses for the first two groups are almost useless because most of them, after one year of attending school in a full-time program, have difficulty filling in a simple form or doing a formal interview, for instance. Although the group with the formal education can learn in either, I think the outcome is not equal to their efforts and the time which they spend studying.

I think that the problem is rooted in the design of the beginner-level courses, which are not suitable for adults. The immigrants, whose ages run between 20 and 60, don't have the natural ability like children do to absorb a new language simply through listening and speaking at school or through everyday communication. Also, there is a belief among the older group of immigrants that because of their age, they don't have the capability of studying anymore, particularly a new language. Perhaps their time for studying is past.

Nevertheless, I think this is not true, because in general, adults with mature minds have great potential for learning. Comparing the capability for learning of an adult with that of a child shows that the capacity for

learning in humans continues to rise. For example — it's only an example to explain the problem — the total new information that a talented grade five student can add to his or her knowledge for the period of one week by studying usually is not comparable with the achievement of a professor in scientific research through only a single day.

Also, in the field of academic English, the adult ESL students improve their English very fast. Usually, a college ESL student, after two years of attending ESL classes, is eligible to enrol in some courses other than English. However, studies show that children become as skilled at the new language in the term of conversation with great pronunciation very fast. For adults that is not possible. Indeed, compared to adults, the children are good recorders of new information.

On the other hand, mature people, particularly if they are educated, using their rich network of developed knowledge, experience and skills, can study more new things. Therefore, they can learn a new language very well but only by an appropriate method. In the meantime, it is important to pay attention to their weaknesses and abilities in planning a course for them.

I think, regarding the ELSA courses, that adults are capable of studying English by the method of studying an academic subject, which is absolutely different from the way in which children learn a new language. In reality, children learn naturally, similar to the manner in which babies learn their mother tongue, which doesn't have anything in common with studying. Accordingly, English for the children of new immigrants is like their second mother tongue, which they eventually speak without accent. However, the adults have to learn it only through studying, like other subjects at school.

The capability of adults in logical and abstract thinking and analyzing should be deliberated in designing a course for them. I think that regarding this ability of adults, the courses for them ought to have more explanation of the materials used in the lessons. In the case of the beginner-level ELSA courses, I think a lack of enough explanation of the concepts in the lessons is the most important reason for the failure of a high percentage of the students. By "explanation" here I mean enlightenment of the meaning of everyday English words through some simple English texts and clarification of English grammar at a basic level for the students in the native languages of the students.

However, the ELSA courses were designed to teach more by the practice of listening and speaking, which is good for children, not adults. In fact, explanation and analyzing in English, when the students still know very little English, is not possible. If explanation was possible, the teacher could teach them, and the student could understand and learn — period. As a result, they achieve a capacity to set up a foundation for their English, so there was not any ground for ineffectiveness of the courses.

Indeed, for the beginning learner students, it's essential to study simple, beginner-level English grammar. Among the beginner-level adult Afghan immigrant students, the educated group gained their knowledge of English grammar with the help of their knowledge of the Dari grammar. But the others simply don't have any way to learn it. In fact, in ELSA courses, a course on English grammar is not possible, because the grammar could only be taught by analyzing and the students at ELSA level are not capable of understanding the analysis of a complicated subject like grammar in English.

Consequently, if the immigrants, through their direct communication, develop their vocabulary, they use the English words in the wrong way. For example, instead of saying, "I can't speak English," they say: "I no English."

Establishment of the beginner-level English courses for the adult new immigrants in their own native languages through their communities might provide a solution for the problem. Teaching by the method of an explanation of English grammar and text in the languages of the students is possible.

Even the educated ESL students think that a course of English at the beginning level in their own native languages is more helpful than the current courses. A student in a course in their own language would be able to study simple structure of English grammar and everyday English words. The course should be finished when the students are able to have basic conversation in English.

Actually, this kind of course could make available a start point for the development of English for the students in the future. Otherwise, the current courses will continue to produce students who are not really functional in the language.

M. Polak: Just so that I have this clear. You're suggesting that at the very beginner level, what would be most effective is for instruction in a mother tongue with respect to explanation. So if you speak German, then you should have your beginner-level English instruction with explanation in German.

M. Fazeli: In German, yes. Because when they don't know absolutely, they have difficulty understanding what the teacher is explaining to them.

R. Lee: Yes, I think that in a lot of other countries, when they learn English, they teach that in their own mother tongue. Say, for example, in learning English in a Chinese school system, they will use Chinese to explain the grammar of English.

Sometimes there are pros and cons. If the instruction and the learning environment are totally in English, then it is probably easier, sometimes easier, for the student to learn the whole language. I think that sometimes depends on the individuals. Some individuals will be more effective in learning in a certain kind of environment.

M. Fazeli: I think the courses in English…. It is useful when the students know a little bit of English. When they don't know absolutely, it's clear that it's useless.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Seeing no further question, Mohammed, I want to thank you for coming, taking the time and making this very good presentation. Thank you.

J. Nuraney (Chair): With no further presenters, members, I adjourn the meeting. Thank you all for participating.

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1)	Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC	Dileep Athaide, Phillip Legg
2)	Adult Basic Education Association of British Columbia	Yvonne Chard
3)	Invergarry Learning Centre, SD No. 36 (Surrey)	Lee Weinstein, Virginia Campbell
4)	Surrey Teachers’ Association	Lynda Toews
5)	Canadian Immigrant Settlement Sector Alliance	Chris Friesen

6)	Beverley Krieger
7)	Adult Educators’ Provincial Specialist Association	Victor Guenther
8)	Servants Anonymous Society Surrey	Lynda Dickson
9)	Richard Stock
10)	Mohammed Fazeli

Committee Staff:	Josie Schofield (Committee Research Analyst)

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