By Maggie Macintosh, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Winnipeg Free Press More than 15,000 students \u2014 including six in 10 children and youth in one Manitoba school division \u2014 were chronically absent from class in 2023-24. Leaked government documents expose the troubling state of truancy in elementary and high schools across the province. \u201cUnbelievable\u201d and \u201cmind-blowing\u201d were among the descriptors that came to mind for Kent Dueck when he saw the data, which an ex-NDP MLA obtained and made public on Wednesday. Dueck, the executive director of Inner City Youth Alive, has spent more than a decade advocating for interventions to address absenteeism in Winnipeg. \u201cThis should force us into action on the issue,\u201d he said. \u201cNow that it\u2019s out in the open and everybody knows, I think we\u2019re in a… <\/p>\n
By Maggie Macintosh, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Winnipeg Free Press More than 15,000 students \u2014 including six in 10 children and youth in one Manitoba school division \u2014 were chronically absent from class in 2023-24. Leaked government documents expose the troubling state of truancy in elementary and high schools across the province. \u201cUnbelievable\u201d and \u201cmind-blowing\u201d were among the descriptors that came to mind for Kent Dueck when he saw the data, which an ex-NDP MLA obtained and made public on Wednesday. Dueck, the executive director of Inner City Youth Alive, has spent more than a decade advocating for interventions to address absenteeism in Winnipeg. \u201cThis should force us into action on the issue,\u201d he said. \u201cNow that it\u2019s out in the open and everybody knows, I think we\u2019re in a... <\/p>\n