Meet Student Needs - For the sake of our children and for a prosperous Ottawa, we must ensure all students receive a good education. Children must be able to attend school safely, without fear of bullying. The needs of special education students, students learning English as a second language, and students at risk must be adequately addressed.

• Let's work together with community organizations to develop programs that better address needs and that reduce the re-occurrence of bullying behaviour. There are organizations in Ottawa such as Child and Youth Friendly Ottawa and YOUCAN that do good work on the issue of bullying in our community and in other school boards. It's time our schools started to work with these and other organizations to better ensure our children's safety at school.
• Let's ensure better supervision is in place in our schools and school yards. As part of recent teacher negotiations, the Ministry of Education agreed to limits on the amount of time that teachers spend supervising students before school, after school and during lunch hours without giving school boards funding to hire additional staff.
• Given short timelines in changes to special education funding, the Board had to respond to reductions in funding by simply cutting programs and services without much planning. Let's ensure as much as possible that these changes improve programs for our students and are implemented with a minimum of harm and disruption.
• Let's improve our English-as-a-Second-Language services. The board has implemented a SynreVoice service, an automated phone message service to parents. This must be provided in languages other than English. The Board needs to produce more materials in other languages. There are many excellent examples of schools, school councils, community organizations such as OCISO, and others who successfully reach out to immigrant communities. The Board needs to be more creative in finding both community resources and financial resources from other levels of government to better strengthen our services, such as providing more multi-cultural liaison officers, to immigrant and ESL students in our schools. Particularly as Ottawa’s immigrant population is increasing, we must find a way to maintain the numbers of English-as-a-Second Language Teachers and Multicultural Liaison Officers. As it currently stands, their numbers will be reduced next year.
• Co-operate with school councils and community organizations to make sure our schools are welcoming to all parents. Physical or logistical barriers often prevent low-income parents or parents with disabilities from accessing our schools. Let's share best practices to work at reducing this. Low income parents and immigrant parents often work shift work. Let's schedule at least some school events for times other than the evening and ensure that school functions are open to students' siblings. School breakfasts are catching on with more and more parents.
• Create more opportunities for physical activities in our schools. Students spend most of their waking hours sitting at desks or in bus seats. We all know this is unhealthy for our children but it is also damaging their ability to learn. This problem must be seriously addressed.
• Even if we can't always find more funding for our schools, it shouldn't mean that we shouldn't try to meet kids' needs. Ottawa has many organizations that are doing wonderful work with our kids. Let's form closer ties and work with them.
• When schools fail, society is left to pick up the pieces. Let's acknowledge that our youth are members of our families and community before, during and after they come into our schools. We owe it to these families and the community to do our utmost to prevent all students from falling between the cracks. If our schools can't do that, the community has every right to demand improvement and to step in and work with us. There's no monopoly on educating children.