The school board deserves applause for the decision to go to a lottery system to fill limited French immersion spots this year.
Last year saw a lineup of parents camped out in front of École Mt. Prevost. We use the term “camped out” quite literally. There were tents on display, and folding chairs to keep backsides off the cold ground.
This was under the previous first-come, first-served system of deciding which children would make the kindergarten cut.
While neither system in perfect, the drawbacks of what happened last year outweigh the drawbacks of a lottery system.
While we applaud the dedication of parents who spent days in line to get their kids into French immersion, that system had some built-in undesirable inequalities.
Single working parents, for example, had no option to line up for days. Parents who were unable to take time off of work were also left out.
For some, no matter how great the desire, it simply wasn’t possible for them to fight for their kid’s spot in the program.
And it is antithetical to our public school system to decide a child’s education by their parents’ marital status or wealth.
It was creating an uncomfortably two-tier divide.
The lottery will leave some families frustrated. But it is as fair a system as we can come up with to decide who’s in and who’s out.
Ideally, of course, any student whose parents want them to take French immersion should be given the opportunity.
We are a bilingual country, with far too few people who actually speak both official languages.
And British Columbia, geographically far from the French centre of Canada in Quebec, is perhaps one of the most uniligual English provinces of the lot. Provinces such as Manitoba, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, along with Ontario, have far more bilingual skills on the whole than we do in B.C.
There are many benefits to speaking more than one language. It can aid in employability, and simply give one a broader outlook on life. Who doesn’t want to be able to communicate clearly with as many people as possible? And learning something early in life can be a lot easier than trying to cram it into our aging brains later.
Though late French immersion in school has proven to be just as effective for students as early programs.
Students are still able to catch up fast at that age. So don’t despair if luck isn’t on your side in this year’s lottery.