Local children are lagging behind the province and the country, when measured for a range of developmental skills.
More than a third of Innisfail kindergarten children surveyed as part of Alberta's Early Child Development Mapping Initiative experience difficulty or great difficulty with communication skill and general knowledge.
Language and thinking skills was another area where more than 30 per cent of the students aged four to seven were found to have difficulty or great difficulty, upon analysis.
In total 29.65 per cent of children experienced great difficulty in one or more areas of development, compared with 26.96 in Alberta and 25.40 nationally.
“I was surprised to see on the whole that our percentage of kids experiencing difficulty in one or more areas of development was actually higher than the Alberta norm,” said Heather Dixon, the town's community facilitator. “I thought we would be very average.”
A questionnaire completed by Chinook's Edge kindergarten teachers in 2009, 2010 and 2012, with Red Deer Catholic Regional joining in 2012, measured social competence, physical heath and well-being, language and thinking skills, emotional maturity and communication and general knowledge development. Surveys related to children with an Innisfail postal code even if they were going to school in Red Deer.
The survey, called the Early Development Instrument, was completed for 250 Innisfail children with parental consent, though just 172 were analyzed since students who had been in class for less than one month were excluded, as were questionnaires with missing data, children with severe disabilities, and children below age four and above age seven. Six per cent of total questionnaires were for children medically diagnosed as having a severe disabling condition and were not factored in to the data.
Children are considered to be experiencing difficulty when showing some delays in areas of development, with scores falling between the bottom 10 and 25 per cent on the EDI compared with other children in Canada. Children experiencing great difficulty are those who experience significant delays in development, falling in the bottom 10 per cent of the EDI compared with other Canadian children. The questionnaire was developed by the Offord Centre for Child Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.
“So when it came in that way it made me realize that what we've started with the family centre downstairs in the Kemp House here, that we are going to make a huge impact on these areas that we need to work on,” Dixon said. “The kids that need some extra support, we can catch them now and start building those life skills and those development areas.”
A local coalition called Envision Children First Innisfail made up of members from the Innisfail Family Day Home Society, Discoveries Playschool, Family School Wellness Workers, the Innisfail Ministerial Asssociation, the Healthy Families program, Family and Community Support Services and the Henday Association for Lifelong Learning, among others, came together in December 2010 to begin tackling issues faced by young children. They secured a grant of $50,000 from Alberta Education and started the Family Centre, targeting children aged 0-5 years of age.
Because the government was sluggish in providing information Dixon went out and spoke with about 100 families so the community could get a head start on solving some of the developmental issues about youth. The questionnaire analysis came back Oct. 26.
“We're really excited that we got the Family Centre up and running because it really answers all of these areas of development where we're showing that we might be a little bit behind,” Dixon told council Nov. 13.
