As they do every two years, many Thompson students will spend a bit of time in February filling out a survey about their lifestyles and behaviours.
The Youth Behaviour Survey has been done biannually in the School District of Mystery Lake since 1986, when the local Adolescent Health Education Committee (AHEC) was founded asks students from Grade 7 through Grade 12 to answer a series of questions. The survey has expanded heavily over the years, including in the 1990s when a full-time addictions worker was hired by the school district, at which point it incorporated questions around addictions and substance use. The RCMP have also begun adding questions of their own.
"The students are quite willing to contribute, and they answer it, and the validity of the survey is actually amazing, the fact that we get all of the students and the reliability of the results and the reliability over time, which suggests that the students aren't messing with it," explained John Donovan, Northern regional director for the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba (AFM), one of the organizations involved in the survey, at the Jan. 11 meeting of school board trustees.
"Each time a new component is added, it's increased the number of questions and the variety of questions to make sure that the services directed through AHEC are actually meeting the needs of the student," said Donovan. The survey is administered by Winnipeg-based Proactive Information Services, which analyzes the data and ensures that the survey is statistically significant. A lot of the time we do samples, as AFM we do samples - this is an actual survey of all the students who are enrolled," said Donovan.
Though the survey is given to all students, anyone can be exempted from it with a simple phone call from a parent to the school principal. "The parent has the right to decide that their child does not participate," explained board chair Rob Pellizzaro. So that parents know what will be asked of their kids, copies of the survey are also available at each school.
Data from the survey is made available to school board trustees and administration, as well as the Burntwood Regional Health Authority, which pays for the survey. The data is also broken down for each school, and each principal is given the results from their school. "As a school, you can work with that data in your school and you can probably figure out who those 20 or 30 kids are, so you know where to develop your programming," said Donovan. "It's worthwhile to the school." According to assistant superintendent Angele Bartlett, the data will be analyzed and sent back to Thompson around the end of the school year. A summary will also be prepared and made available to the public.
The survey is anonymous insofar as students are not asked to give their names. However, the data is broken down by gender, grade, and school, which helps the various administrative agencies better focus their resources where they are most needed.
"It's very reliable, and in that way it's valuable to us as community agencies," explained Donovan. "This really helps us be able to direct services. A principal looking at that data can say 'gee, more kids at our school are living in families that have substance abusing parents. They enlist our support - we work more actively with some elementary schools than with others, and that's a result of that survey."
"Having this survey data goes a long way when you're making applications for funding," he continued. "If you have data to back it up, it goes a long way." School district programs on smoking cessation and anti-bullying were cited as two examples of initiatives which were borne out of this survey, along with the decision to introduce a full-time substance abuse counsellor position to the district.
Drawing on data from the most recent Youth Behaviour Survey, Donovan noted some troubling facts. "The trends in the North are higher for substance use, alcohol and marijuana," he said. "You're looking at probably a 10 to 12 per cent increase in the North compared to kids in Winnipeg, if you look at rural Manitoba we're about seven per cent." Donovan said that alcohol is the most common drug among Thompson youth, followed by marijuana, but that ecstasy was also far more popular here than anywhere else serviced by AFM.
"The thing that's scary, for me, is the age of onset is different here than it is in the south," continued Donovan. "We're looking at a year to a year-and-a-half advance in terms of onset for substance use."
"We used to be clearly farther ahead in working with ninth-graders, we have a demand now to be involved with substance-abusing youth in seventh or eighth, or even some sixth-graders across the North," he added. "Those challenges place us to look at it differently. We used to say we only worked with kids who are 12 or over - well, you can have an 11-year-old kid who's substance abusing, that kid may be in the theatre smoking dope. They may not be a chronic substance abuser, but the fact that you have that third-grader who's smoking marijuana - you need to work with the family, you need to work with child welfare, and you need to work with the school counsellors."
"I'm really disheartened to hear that nine-year-olds are already getting involved with drugs," responded Pellizzaro. "It's really a sad commentary on our society, but I suppose if you can't confront the problem, you can't fix it. We need to at least know what's going on."
