Changes in ontario students assistance programme essay

In my opinion, the changes effected by the Ontario Student Assistance programme have brought more harm than good to the student fraternity. I believe that the adjusted measures will affect the students severely. Most of the changes made are not in line with promoting students’ interests and should, therefore, be voted against. Therefore, this essay highlights the approach that I will use together with a partnering institution to influence more students especially those from less privileged backgrounds to come and vote against the new changes. First things first, the approach to the process will take the form of participatory consultation approach. We plan on availing incentives that will attract the target student populations to attend the seminars, answer the interviews questions and attend some of the public forums that we will be organizing.

The portfolio of incentives that we plan to avail will range from catering for the food expenses that the students may incur during the seminars to keep them motivated and allow them to participate fully. Further, we plan to liaise with the local government education department to provide some career training and allocate a few internship spaces for the students the will participate in our participatory consultation forum. We also intend to avail transport services for the students that will purpose to attend. We will use a few large buses hired through the help of funding from the partner institution to ensure that all students that wish to attend are able to attend conveniently. According to Simone (2009), it is not clear whether the informal public as a whole can be deliberative.

Consequently, there is has been a significant shift from the traditional mass publics in favor of mini-politics. This move has been made possible through the designation of settings or modeling of publics to achieve setups where critical dialogues can take place. Simone (2009) further highlights that even ideally rational deliberation ought to be framed in a way that they are rhetoric-free1. The issue of student welfare requires the input of the various stakeholders within the academic area. We project that not all target students may be able to make time and attend the participatory consultation at once. Therefore, to ensure that we accommodate all students considering those with tight schedules we will have the three events happening on three separate days. Pateman (2012) states that even though democracy is the rule of the majority, inclusion of the minority in the public participation process is important3.

We project that due to work, health reasons or family issues, not all the students may attend fixed location seminars as well. Consequently, we propose a diverse public outreach programme4 to ensure that the information reaches all the target audience. Having set the foundation through the debate and online platforms, we will embark on a tour around the city of Ontario with a particular inclination towards areas where student populations are high. At this point, having stated our objective and goals, we will be seeking the opinions of the students as well as the former students on the new changes to the Ontario Student Assistance Programme. The roadshow will play two major roles. The primary role will be to interact with the students, give them the opportunity by voice their views as well as encourage them to come and vote.

The secondary role of the roadshow will be to inform the students of the third event which will be a workshop. These incentives ranged from partial scholarships, training from specialists and recommendation for internship and job opportunities for continuing and graduate students. we also provided food incentives for all participating members and certificates of participation to volunteers who helped make sure the three events were up and running smoothly. The responses from the questionnaires to together with input from all other stakeholders were scrutinized and we came up with several changes that we recommend will be good for the Ontario Student Assistance Programme. These changes are mostly student welfare centered and we anticipate that not all of them will be adopted.

Brunson (2018) states that change and reforms within organizations are always bound to be met by some form of resistance10. We would like a timely and seamless adoption of the changes that will be adopted. However, this might not necessarily be the case. Consequently, we plan to make regular follow-up schedules to ensure that the proposed changes if voted in are implemented within the shortest time possible. Throughout this period our biggest goal will be to muzzle as many students as possible that are directly affected by the new changes to come and vote. Our main concern is that if we rely on students from wealthy and affluent backgrounds, then we may not find the change we so wish to have. Routledge, 2018.