Sunshine Coast Alternative School - Sechelt, British Columbia

Izabelle Stevens

My experience at the alt school was overall horrible. You had some staff who were absolutely lovely and kind and then you had other staff who were horrendous. While there, I had a staff member openly make rude and derogatory comments about my autism, called a fellow student fat, revealed personal health information of students to other students to mock and belittle them and consistently treated us like because we were at alt, it didn’t matter if we were treated with human decency. They also told me that I should “be grateful they even work here because the pay is terrible and nobody else wants to put up with us.” When I lodged a formal complaint to the principal about one specific staff member’s repeated verbal abuse of the students it was swept under the rug and buried, nothing ever coming of it with no follow up whatsoever. Another example of this lack of action when staff members acted inappropriately is when I had a staff member hit the table and scream at me in the middle of a support meeting, with the principal present, and nothing was done outside of them having to say sorry.

I found that the style of teaching might work for some people, but the general feeling i got from fellow students was that it didn’t work for them at all. It is almost entirely done online and independently, which for students at alt due to learning and processing difficulties can make completing the course work extremely difficult from the lack of direct instruction. Say you go to alt because you have behavioural issues and cannot attend the mainstream high schools, if this learning delivery system doesn’t work for you, you’re essentially left in a small building and doomed to fail, with exiting the alt school programs and returning to the mainstream *extremely challenging* since you often times fall behind your peers and grade level because you are not taught on the same consistent work completion schedule. This feature of alt is good if you need the extra time to complete coursework, but if it doesn’t suit you, you are sometimes drastically behind your peers because it took you a year or more to complete a course that in the mainstream they finish in a semester. Because of this, I saw many students having to take extra years to try and finish work and work with a learning style system that they felt was designed for them to fail. Many of the staff try and help and they do what they can but there’s a certain point where the lack of structure of going to classes takes its toll on many students.

I think the alt program needs massive improvements because there is more leeway for students who miss a class at Chatelech then there is at alt. I was told if i missed two classes a semester I would be kicked out of one of the only actual classes where a teacher teaches you. Also, said class was blended, with no differentiation between grade levels so a grade 12 student was taking the same science class and doing the same coursework as a grade 8.

I also found student on student issues were dealt with poorly, we had several male students taking pictures of the girls without consent and posting them with degrading comments such as “eat it fatty” over a photo of a female just eating their lunch and when this issue was brought to the principal/staff they didn’t have any repercussions that stopped their behaviours.

I believe that the alt school needs much more funding so that they can handle the issues of understaffing and address the lack of resources for students to access different types of education options for different learning styles that meet their needs for them to succeed. As well, I would hope in future for the alt school to create a system to address staff misconduct to ensure a safe learning environment for students who are statistically more vulnerable than their peers in the mainstream school system.

Tessa Allen

I think this school is vary loving and caring