By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
The Eastern Townships School Board is inviting recent newcomers to the Townships and longtime residents who want to brush up on their French to give francisation a try.
The intensive full- and part-time courses, offered by the ETSB at Campus Brome-Missisquoi in Cowansville and the New Horizons Centre in Sherbrooke in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Higher Learning and the Ministry of Immigration, Francisation and Integration, are open to adult learners of many backgrounds, including immigrants; certain types of long-term temporary residence permit holders such as temporary workers or their spouses; Canadians arriving in the region from out of province; and members of the local English-speaking community. The passage of Bill 96 expanded eligibility for the courses and created a “one-stop shop” for registration and placement, Francisation Québec, but also created a bottleneck, with provincewide demand nearly doubling over the course of one year and some participants having to wait several months to be placed in a class.
“About a year ago, we started working with [Francisation Québec] and we saw it as an opportunity to bring more students into our buildings,” said New Horizons Centre director and ETSB adult education director Steve Dunn. “It’s also an opportunity to expose students to our wider vocational and adult educational options, if people need to finish high school, prepare for employment or start a vocational program.”
Although Dunn acknowledges that there have been “some bumps on the road on the administrative side,” he said he believes things have “gone very well at the classroom level.”
Dunn said ETSB has seen particularly high demand from recent immigrants and from foreign graduate students doing post-doctoral work in Sherbrooke and their spouses. Although the programs are often “almost at capacity,” Dunn said “we usually have success getting people into classes fairly quickly.”
Funding in doubt
School boards and service centres offer about half of all government-coordinated francisation classes; the bulk of the rest are offered by nonprofits supporting new immigrants. School board- and service-centre-run programs are currently at risk of a funding shortfall brought about by a change in the way provincial government subsidies to the classes are calculated, and by what the Coalition Avenir Québec government has called a lack of federal government support. Programs are at risk of not being reimbursed for expenses incurred going back two years, according to Carl Ouellet of the Association québécoise des directeurs d’école.
“That’s definitely a concern for us, but if we were to stop [offering the classes], we would lose momentum and lose trust,” Dunn said. “We’re hoping that cooler heads prevail and that we’ll be funded the way we expect to be funded. We’re not looking to drop these course offerings – they’re too important.”
The Ministry of Education and Higher Learning had not responded to a request for clarification about the funding issue at press time.
To learn more about francisation at the ETSB, visit adult-learning.ca/course/francisation. Although the landing page is in French, potential learners can ask questions to an English-speaking chatbot or contact the adult education service directly once the board’s offices reopen Aug. 5.