We all share a deep commitment to ensuring that all students with disabilities in Manitoba have equitable access to quality education.
While significant progress has been made over recent years, research confirms that many barriers still remain. Identifying the nature and prevalence of these remaining barriers will be critical in our continuing efforts to address and remove them. This same information will support the call for a strong accessible education standard under the landmark Accessibility for Manitobans Act, and help in setting priorities to be addressed by the standard.
Accordingly, Barrier-Free Manitoba and Education Solutions Manitoba have developed complementary online surveys for three sets of primary stakeholder groups:
- The parents/families of students with disabilities
- Students with disabilities (Grade 7 to post-secondary)
- Educational staff and officials who have the responsibility to provide or oversee the provision of quality education for students with disabilities.
Each of these stakeholder groups have, and can offer, unique and valuable insights into the barriers they face.
Comprehensive in design, the surveys cover all disabilities and include core questions, as well as level-specific questions on:
- Early childhood education/child care
- Nursery to Grade 12
- Post-secondary
A survey takes as little as five minutes to complete. For persons wanting to provide detailed responses, completing a survey might take as long as 30 minutes. The surveys are anonymous and we will not be gathering any identifying information from respondents (unless they wish to receive updates on developments related to the accessible education standard).
We are writing to ask for your help in promoting awareness of the surveys. As a robust response will provide the most reliable results, we are also asking you to encourage all those you work for and with who are members of the above stakeholder groups to complete the surveys.
Here are the URL links to the surveys for each of the stakeholder groups:
Parents/families: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MbEducationParents
Students: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MBEducationStudents
Education staff/officials: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MBEducationStaff
The surveys will remain open until Friday, December 15, 2017. Thereafter, Barrier-Free Manitoba and Education Solutions Manitoba will be taking the lead in analyzing results from the surveys. It is expected that a report on the results will be completed early in the New Year. We will share it with you at that time.
Please consider and take extraordinary measures to promote the surveys. We all share the common goal of improving our educational systems for students with disabilities. The results from this survey will help us advance this goal.
We also invite you to contact us by email if you have any questions or would like additional information on the surveys.
As a final note, we would like to acknowledge the funding support provided by Community Living Manitoba through its Family Engagement Program. This funding support was made possible through the Social Development Projects for People with Disabilities Program operated by Employment and Social Development Canada.
Thank you for your interest and, in advance, for your assistance.