'One is too high:' Manitoba, school divisions trying to track hundreds of unaccounted for students

Every day there are hundreds and sometimes thousands of students who aren't showing up for school, and divisions in Manitoba say they need to get them back in class. 

Many other students have stopped going to school altogether and fallen off the radars of school divisions. It's a problem many have refused to acknowledge the depth of.

"This has been going on for years and it's kind of hidden in plain sight," Kent Dueck said. "The teachers know about it, fellow students know about it but no one has been willing to talk openly about it."

Dueck was part of the province's 14-person Attendance Task Force, which operated from 2019 to 2022. 

"Each kid has their own story. A lot of times kids have just completely dropped out of society, almost, in general," Dueck said. "For a lot of kids they're going day by day and just trying to survive and get by."

While Dueck said some divisions are "ripping the Band-Aid off' and opening up the conversation about chronic absenteeism, many still won't talk about unaccounted students who've gone missing. 

"It's a very, very big problem," he said.

Winnipeg School Division Superintendent Matt Henderson announced earlier this month that the division has plans to address 2,500 students struggling to attend classes regularly.

But there is another section of kids who aren't going at all. 

In fall 2023, Manitoba Education and Early Childhood Learning began collecting information on students identified as experiencing severe chronic absenteeism, where unexcused absences account for 20 or more classes in a single high school course, or at least 20 per cent of instructional days in kindergarten to Grade 8 in a reporting period.

The province asked all school divisions in Manitoba to take a deep dive into their attendance records as part of their commitment to addressing the problem. 

It came on the heels of significant enrolment decreases found around the province in September 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A 115-page report commissioned by the previous Conservative government found more than 6,500 students — nearly four per cent of Manitoba's K-12 population — went missing or were unaccounted for between the start of the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years. 

It called on officials to take immediate action to find thousands of "inactive" learners — students who were previously enrolled in school, stopped attending and had not graduated or moved outside the province.