With only a couple months left in this school year, most of the approximately 100 Syrian refugee students are in school.
That’s according to Anglophone East School District Superintendent Gregg Ingersoll.
He says a few are still in the transition program.
“A few of them are students that are going to be joining us in September in kindergarten,” says Ingersoll. “Now that they’re here we have a better sense of what their needs are and what we need going forward to successfully integrate them into the school system.”
He says with only a couple months left in the school year, that’s not enough time for those students already in the system.
“So we’ll be able to make some gains with them, but certainly they won’t be where we want them to be for September,” says Ingersoll. “So we’re considering for our elementary students a program to support them over the summer to give them an opportunity to get caught up closer to where their peers will be in September.”
He adds these programs will be run in partnership with the Multicultural Association of the Greater Moncton Area.
“Our Welcome Centre has always run summer programs for our international students in cooperation with MAGMA, so we’ve been doing that for several years,” says Ingersoll. “But this year we anticipate having maybe three times as many programs as we’ve had before.”
Ingersoll adds some of these refugee students have never been in school, or have been out of the system for several years.
