Malcolm Gorrill
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Mar 20/00) - Surveyors are interviewing teachers across the NWT to identify what students need and what educators need to help them.

Pauline Gordon, assistant deputy minister of the Department Education, Culture and Employment, said last week the Student Support Needs Assessment Survey began a few weeks ago.

"The survey is to get an indication as to what the student needs are," Gordon said, "and to see where the gap is between the needs and the services and programs that we currently provide."

Gordon said the need for a survey was made known about a year ago.

"We did a strategic plan update on our 15-year document last year. As part of that, the minister's forum went out to various communities," she said.

"The consultations indicated that we weren't, as a system, too clear on what the needs of the students were, and what we had for services."

The seven people conducting the survey were trained as interviewers. Together they will interview every teacher in the NWT about each of their students.

Surveyors will visit communities with 150 students or more, and for the other communities they will conduct interviews with teachers over the phone.

"Because we only have seven surveyors, there's no way that we'd be able to make the June deadline if we were to go into every community because of the logistics," Gordon said.

"We're able to get the data without using the student's name. So once the survey's results are done, we're able to pull out a perforated sheet, so we don't even have the student's name.

"We don't want to have children labelled. We'd like to be able to use the information to make decisions based on what some of the commonalities are," Gordon said.

"We're hoping that we'll have data collected by the end of April and to have enough of the information compiled that we have a document by the end of June."

Gordon said her department is trying to steer away from the term, "special needs."

"Inclusive schooling is more the term that we use, because special needs is just one specific group within a larger group. Inclusive schooling means being able to provide a program for everyone," Gordon said.

"There are periods where everyone needs some kind of special assistance. So we try to look at the fact that we have to be there for all children, no matter what their needs are," she said.

"It can go from any extreme, remediation, tutorial assistance as well as program modification, or even individual education programs, which entails a team of people coming together to try to put a program together for a student."

Gordon said it's still too early to tell what the implications of the survey could be for school boards.