Accessing Services: Experiences of Families Living in Preston
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Until the 1950s Canadian schools were segregated and a series of racist legislation was passed to keep Black Nova Scotians on the margins of society.Given the history of racist legislation and continued miseducation it is no surprise many students in the Preston Township experience academic disparities.There are services aimed to help families, however, these services have been described as complicated and difficult to navigate.The objective of this study was to explore how parents/guardians with students most affected by the opportunity gap make decisions about accessing services and their experience following through with their decision.A qualitative approach using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), combined with research reflexivity through a critical race lens was used.Seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with parents/guardians of students who access services.Transcripts were uploaded to NVivo for qualitative analysis.Parents/guardians represented students from pre-primary to grade 12. Three overarching themes were interpreted from the data.These included: The Struggle for Accountability, Cultural Inclusivity and Safety, and Barriers to accessing services.These findings provide insight into the reasons people choose to access services and their experience following through with their decisions.Our project contributes to strengthening the Preston Township voice around the need, provision, and experience of using services. PrestonNova Scotia (NS) has been home to people of African Descent since European colonialization in the 1600s [12].The first Black person in the region was Matthew De Costa, a translator and guide with the De Monts Expedition in 1605 [12].Nearly a century later, Black Loyalists arrived, drawn by the promise of land, freedom, and economic security in exchange for their service during the War of American Independence [12].This migration was followed by Jamaican Maroons, who were brought to Nova Scotia by the
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".