ROCKY VIEW— Rocky View Schools’ rate of graduating students continues to be higher than the provincial average, according to Superintendent Greg Luterbach.
At a Board of Trustees meeting Thursday (Nov. 19), Luterbach presented the public school division’s Annual Education Results Report (AERR). The report, published each fall, incorporates Rocky View Schools' four-year plan. It includes data compiled by the school division and the results of a satisfaction survey that roughly 16,000 Rocky View Schools students, parents and staff fill out each year.
The aim of the AERR is to improve learning outcomes and target growth in areas such as student engagement, success, parental involvement and institutional support.
“When you look back to last year, you’d have to have your head in the sand to not acknowledge the impact the pandemic caused, not only in RVS [Rocky View Schools] but across the province, across the country and across the world,” Luterbach said. “Certainly, when we pivoted on March 15 to start...at-home learning, that impacted our ability and a lot of different things in the AERR.
“But it’s important also to recognize that the show must go on and that students can’t wait. We owe all of our students the opportunity to grow, improve and learn.”
A little more than 83 per cent of Rocky View Schools students graduate within three years of entering Grade 10, according to the report, which exceeds the provincial average by more than four per cent. Among First Nation, Métis and Inuit (FNMI) students, Luterbach said the rate was 71 per cent – 15 per cent higher than the average throughout Alberta.
“RVS continues, through the hard work of our staff, to have very strong high school completion rates, including our Indigenous learners,” he said. “We continue to work to lower that gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peers, but when we look at it compared to the province, we do extremely well. Most of our students get through high school – certainly a higher portion of them than across the province.”
As for what Rocky View Schools students do after graduating, the report outlined that 55.6 per cent of alumni transition from high school to post-secondary within six years. Provincially, the average is 60.1 per cent.
One area Rocky View Schools succeeded last year was the district's low rate of student drop outs, Luterbach said. According to the report, Rocky View Schools had a student dropout rate of 1.6 per cent in 2019-20 – one per cent lower than the provincial average of 2.6 per cent. A positive, Luterbach said, was that Rocky View Schools’ FNMI students had a dropout rate of 2.9 per cent, which is slightly more than half of Alberta’s 5.5 per cent average.
"We work hard on that and we're proud of our efforts there, but again, we'd like that to be zero and to have no gap between our Indigenous and non-Indigenous students," he said.
Regarding student attendance, Luterbach said the report outlined that 77 per cent of Rocky View Schools students attend more than 90 per cent of their classes.
Luterbach said this year’s AERR does not include some data, including scores from the spring 2020 provincial achievement tests and diploma exams, which were cancelled due to the pandemic.
Following Luterbach's presentation, trustees approved the AERR as presented.
As of press time, the AERR was not made public. According to Rocky View Schools Director of Communications Tara de Weerd, the report should be posted on rockyview.ab.ca by Nov. 27.
