Truancy is topping 70 per cent, kids are slipping through the cracks, and volunteers are the only ones holding things together

By Rodney Clifton
and Pierre Gilbert

The boarded-up houses and school-aged children roaming Winnipeg’s North End point to a crisis in a school system that has failed its most vulnerable students. A visible sign of how completely the system has broken down is truancy soaring past 70 per cent while the government does nothing to stop it.

Official statistics paint a grim picture of the neighbourhood, where high rates of single parenthood, drug dependency, child poverty and teenage pregnancy are endemic.

The only chance these children have of escaping this cycle of poverty and dependence and succeeding in life is through education.

Inner City Youth Alive (ICYA), a North End-based non-profit organization, has launched an outreach program to address chronic absenteeism. It produced Absent, a documentary showing that many North End children are Indigenous and have missed up to three years of school. Their work highlights what the formal education system has been unwilling or unable to confront.

The official data tell the same story. While a school administrator claimed a truancy rate of about 6.7 per cent in some North End schools, Manitoba’s provincial assessments have long identified chronic absenteeism as a significant barrier to student outcomes in high-poverty neighbourhoods.

Since Manitoba allocates per-student funding based on enrolment reported at the start of the school year, administrators go to great lengths to ensure high attendance on that single count day. Many students drift away soon after, leaving taxpayers to fund education for children who are not being taught.

ICYA has also set up a mentoring program to get the children into school and keep them there. It should not be left to volunteers to do work the school board and the provincial government are not doing.

In the recent throne speech, the provincial government made 15 pledges to Manitobans. They included opening a supervised drug-consumption site, improving staff-to-patient ratios in the health-care system and addressing the rising cost of groceries.

Nothing was said about helping disadvantaged children stay in school or confronting the scale of the absenteeism crisis.

What should be done now?

First, schools should not receive money for children they do not teach. The government should enact legislation to ensure schools are funded for students who attend throughout the school year. Attendance records could be submitted at several points during the year.

This kind of accountability would encourage schools to keep students enrolled until they graduate.

Second, the minister of education should appoint a blue-ribbon commission to study truancy rates in all schools in the province and issue concrete recommendations.

Winnipeg’s North End children deserve an education. Unless the system confronts the problem directly and accepts responsibility for fixing it, thousands of children will continue to be left behind. The longer this crisis is ignored, the harder it will be to repair the damage.

Rodney A. Clifton is a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba. With Mark DeWolf, he is the editor of From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (2024). Pierre Gilbert is an associate professor emeritus at the Canadian Mennonite University. He authored Revoking the Charitable Status for the Advancement of Religion: A Critical Assessment, a report examining the 2025 House of Commons Standing Committee’s recommendation to revoke charitable status for religious organizations. Both are senior fellows at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.