Malcolm Gorrill
Northern News Services

Inuvik (Oct 27/00) - Homework will soon be an everyday routine for every child attending school in the district.

The Beaufort-Delta Education Council (BDEC) met here recently, and issued a directive calling on schools to develop policies on homework by Jan. 1.

This follows a policy approved by the BDEC in June.

The policy gives general direction to teachers on assigning homework and requires each school to devise its own policy (which follows BDEC guidelines). School policies must then be reviewed and approved by the appropriate district education authority.

One requirement in the BDEC's homework policy is that homework must be assigned by every teacher, in every grade, every school day.

During debate on the directive it was suggested that some kids would have someone else do their work for them, and that it could result in too much homework for some.

"We've already got a policy," said chairperson Bob Simpson. "All we're doing is directing the schools to implement it."

Quality of education

After the meeting, Simpson said the purpose of the policy is to help students get a better education, and "also to involve parents a little more in the children's schoolwork."

It's all part of the BDEC's effort to tackle one of its biggest challenges, improving the standard of education.

"Our graduation rate is nothing to be very proud of," Simpson said.

"It's still pretty dismal on an NWT or national scale. We certainly can't say we are meeting any normal scale of graduation," he said.

"The success of the students is a priority and is a major challenge. To improve upon that, that's a constant. We do have special needs, probably proportionately greater, so that is a money problem. We don't have the resources to adequately even identify the problem."

Running a deficit

The BDEC is running a deficit this year, but it's not as big as was projected.

Simpson explained that the operating budget for the BDEC has run a deficit for the past six years or so.

"We started off six or seven years ago with a substantial surplus, and we've been slowly eating that away through our operations," Simpson said.

"For the past couple of years, we've been close to a zero balance," he explained.

"We continue to chew away at our surplus, and we budget to chew away at our surplus, but by the end of the year, we haven't eaten as much as anticipated," Simpson said.

"There was major cutbacks in government, so we were trying to address that by hiring extra teachers as we were being reduced in our formulas and so forth. So we've been managing to do that.

"It's lightened up a little bit, but our surplus is pretty well gone now."