Chris Molcak will never forget the first meeting he had at the John McInnis Centre in July 2010, after taking on the role as principal at the Centre for Learning Alternatives (CLA).
It was with a group of high-ranking RCMP officers all wondering how Molcak planned on running a school that caters to the needs of alternate students already identified for their high-risk behaviours.
"They're kids whose behaviours wouldn't allow them to maintain mainstream school enrolment and we were going to bring 250 of them and put them all in the same building with an adult learning centre," said Molcak.
"Community policing wanted to know how we were going to deal with it. They were talking about monthly meetings and having a police presence here, and what our emergency building evacuation and lockdown plans were.
"September started up and the kids came in and they started taking ownership of the school, and once that happened, we didn't meet with the police again."
Although the CLA has only been open for 15 months, the alternate education students developed a sense of community and caring for each other much earlier than the school's administrative staff had anticipated.
"A lot of the kids really feel disenfranchised and non-participatory in school so our teachers and the rest of our staff have made a concerted effort to make them feel that this is their home," said CLA vice-principal Kevin
Baldridge.
"Sometimes this is the one area of sanity in their lives. We have very little behavioural issues because kids are connected to the building and the staff and tend to want to live up to our expectations."
Following the closure of six schools in the district, the John McInnis Centre opened in the fall of 2010 to consolidate the alternate education and adult education programs and provide a central location for student services.
An estimated 2,300 people from the ages of five to 70 access programs at John McInnis.
Being centralized at the former John McInnis junior secondary school gives CLA staff several advantages that benefit alternate education students.
The school has a gymnasium, shops for teaching wood/metal work and automotive mechanics, a food services kitchen and designated rooms for textiles and the band program. Before the move to John McInnis, students had to be transported by youth care workers from other schools for their optional courses.
The CLA is home to several alternate community education programs, all of which have wait lists, including Storefront I and II (for students aged 14 to 17), Concept Ed, TEAM (Together Everyone Achieves More), and Connections (for elementary-aged students).
Rather than working in relative isolation, as they often are when teaching at satellite locations, the 14 CLA teachers have the benefit of regular planning and strategy sessions that help them devise better methods to teach at-risk students.
The satellite alternative programs include Transitional Alternate Program Secondary (TAPS), Summit (for alternate students in the Kelly Road catchment area), Youth Around Prince (for street kids), Intersect (for students at risk due to mental health issues), and the Teen Moms Alternate Program (for pregnant or parenting teens).
The CLA is also the base of the Camp Trapping and Youth Containment Centre programs as well as hospital youth education program in the pediatric and detoxification units of UHNBC.
The CLA offers distance education courses and an international program to help new Canadian students learn English. The district resource centre is also housed at the CLA, providing equipment and teaching materials to area schools.
Since November 2010, student support services (speech pathologists, child psychologists, occupational therapists, specialists who teach hearing- or visual-impaired students, district resource teachers and international settlement workers) have been based at the John McInnis Centre. Because alternate education students are more likely to require support services, having those specialized educators in the same building helps them stay in close contact with the students and their teachers.
Adult students aged 19 and older can enroll in continuing education classes at John McInnis to help them achieve their Dogwood diplomas.
The concept of centralizing all the services the John McInnis Centre offers is unique in the province and has drawn interest from administrators in the Lower Mainland, Chilliwack, the Okanagan, Smithers and Prince Rupert.
"This is an extremely unique situation and it didn't explode on us," said Baldridge.
"In fact, it's the exact opposite, it's producing great results."
