Preventing school dropout through community worker interventions modeling

The project is part of a desire to address the school dropout issue, particularly in multi-ethnic and disadvantaged communities. Despite the implementation of several universal interventions in Quebec, the drop-out rate remains high in numerous areas. In the Eastern Townships area, a partnership between the Sherbrooke Regional School Board and the Université de Sherbrooke in the form of a research chair has been established to study the issue since 2007. As a result, a new program (i.e., Accès 5) was initiated in partnership with a community organism, the Maison Jeunes-Est (MJE) that allowed community workers, school personnel and researchers to work together towards a common goal: better social and educational outcomes for youth. The ultimate goal of the program is to change the culture of education in the targeted community. Although the evaluation of Accès 5 demonstrated great promise for helping youth reach better outcomes, there were limitations. First, there was very little data gathered pertaining to specific undertaken actions/interventions, due to the high variability in intervention style. Second, the program is deployed in one setting, due to the limitations of the used tools. Finally, no tool enables interconnecting such variability of data sources.

Faculty Supervisor:

Bessam Abdulrazak;Anne Lessard

Student:

Partner:

Maison Jeunes-Est

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Other services (except public administration)

University:

Université de Sherbrooke

Program: