EMMA GODMERE
CUP Ottawa Bureau Chief

OTTAWA (CUP) — The federal government is hoping more Canadian students will stay in school and make it through to post-secondary education, following a funding announcement made last week.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced in Toronto on March 3 that the government will invest $20 million over four years into Pathways to Education Canada, a charitable organization that helps students from low-income communities complete high school and make the successful transition to college and university.

“[The] funding that’s coming from the federal government is in support of what we’re calling our Graduation Nation initiative, which is about taking the program nationally,” said Pathways to Education president and CEO David Hughes, adding that one of the organization’s main goals is to curb high school dropout rates nationwide.

The program was launched in 2001 at a community health centre in Toronto to initially provide youth with some of the most basic things they required to help get them into the classroom every day.

“What we found when we first designed the program was that students weren’t even able to get to school because they didn’t have bus tickets,” he explained. “And we know that sometimes they’re not able to focus because they’re not getting decent meals through the course of the day — so whether they be lunch vouchers or bus tickets, [we offer] some kind of financial support to help them through week to week, month to month.”

Hughes explained the program now also includes after-school tutoring and mentoring, coaching and family support, and help in accessing bursaries, grants and scholarships — and even offers a scholarship of their own. Since 2001, the program has expanded to 11 communities in four provinces.

“We anticipate that within the next five years we should be in seven to eight provinces and we hope to get to 18 to 20 sites in that same time period,” he said.

Pathways to Education has received support from the governments of Ontario and Manitoba before, and Hughes estimates the organization is about 60 to 70 per cent funded by public dollars. The remaining 30 to 40 per cent comes from corporations, foundations and individual donors.

“We’ve been very lucky, in the beginning, to have some initial private investors or private donors who saw the value of the program,” he said. “I think they saw the return on investment that’s clearly an important part of our work.”

Pathways to Education currently supports approximately 3,400 students and aims to increase this number to 10,000 by 2016.

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image: Alex Smyth/The Fulcrum