In the 2023-2024 school year, we continued to focus on mental health within the context of our Catholic faith. We concentrated our efforts on establishing a board-level mental health student champion leadership and planning group, named BWell, which engaged secondary students in mental health promotion at the system-level and provided a platform for their leadership, agency, and voices. In addition, we created DCDSB Let’s Talk Day, which focused on supporting student’s understanding of how to access help and supports for their mental health. During the school year, the board also worked to support the implementation of the Ministry of Education new mental health modules for all Grade 7 and Grade 8 students. Staff professional development and training with regards to mental health and well-being continued to be a priority, with a focus on supporting students’ self-regulation and connection, noticing signs of mental health difficulties and how staff may offer support.
In the 2023-2024 school year, we focused on building staff capacity to support positive student attendance. We delivered key messages to all staff about the role they have in supporting student engagement, creating positive connections with students, and addressing underlying barriers as key enablers for positive school attendance. Through monitoring of student attendance data, we saw positive improvements in the areas of earlier intervention when consecutive absenteeism begins to emerge as well as an increase in the percentage of students who attended school 90% of the time or more. This work lays an excellent foundation for the 2024-2025 school year, where we plan to strengthen the trauma-informed lens in future attendance awareness resources, messages, interventions and supports.
We invite you to learn more about the strategic goals and actions accomplished in our 2023-2024 Year-End Report.
2023-2024 Student Achievement Plan Year-End Report
Our Stories
Suicide Prevention and Intervention Protocol