Child refugees are driving up Montreal school enrolment, says CSSDM services director

With 1,500 new registrations in two months, the Centre de services scolaire de Montral is facing a record number of students to welcome in French language classes.

Elementary school students represent two-thirds of those registrations, and the remaining ones are high school students. A few hundred already speak French and can go directly to regular classes.

Mathieu Desjardins, the director of services for the Centre de services scolaire de Montral (CSSDM) credits the rise in enrolment to irregular entries into Quebec via Roxham Road, and the war in Ukraine.

He says the vast majority of new registrations are asylum seekers, mostly from Mexico, Colombia, Haitiand Ukraine.

The largest school service centre in Quebec needs to hire dozens of new teachers, which remains a challenge with the ongoing labour shortage.

"Each new registration forces us to open new classes, because we have no spots in the existing classes," said Desjardins.

He added that delays between students registering and accessing class are longer than before and the student-to-teacher ratio is greater.

Building trust

Olivier Kenfack, a teacher at Saint-Pascal-Baylon elementary school, says his class is the most diverse it has ever been.

He now has students from Cameroon, the West Indies, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey, Ukraine and the Philippines.

"I tell myself that these are students who arrive with baggage," he said. "I first help them to undo this linguistic and cultural baggage, then I rely on this baggage to add a layer of French."

Having taught in Cameroon and Europe, he says his first task is to build trust with his students.

Nathalie Blanchet, principal of Saint-Pascal-Baylon, says she noticed how much the make-up of welcome classes at her school has changed. "There was a break during the pandemic, but now we have families who arrive with nothing and need everything."

The presence of social work officers from the CSSDM, who form the link between schools, families and community organizations, has become essential.

They even organized a winter clothes giveaway in the church next to Saint-Pascal-Baylon.

The only prerequisite for children to be enrolled in school is to have a fixed address. But the shortage of affordable housing continues to be an obstacle for many. Dozens of families search formonths before finding housing.

"Last Monday, we received 35 asylum seekers of Kurdish origin, a group that has been in hotels for four months, who cannot find accommodation, and so no schooling for the children," said Rim Bouallgue, a CSSDM social service worker.

Guidance counsellors and social workers from the CSSDM have started preparing kits and activities for children who are waiting to attend school.

From January to October, there were nearly 31,000 irregular entries at Roxham Road out of about 49,000 asylum applications made to Canadian border services.

This single point of entry at the border of Quebec and New York State represents two-thirds of irregular entries into Canada since January 2022.