My Kid Did EFP 12 Online Through NIDES: What BC Parents Should Know Before You Sign Up
Last January, I was folding mismatched soccer socks at our kitchen table when my 17-year-old son Jaden slid his high school timetable across the chipped Formica, shoulders hunched. He’d signed up for every elective he needed to graduate, but the required EFP 12 (Education for First Peoples 12) slot was full—our small rural school on North Vancouver Island only offers the course every other year, and this was the off year. His counselor suggested we look at NIDES, the North Island Distance Education School, for an online EFP 12 credit. When I Googled “who has done EFP12 online through NIDES”, all I got was course catalogs and district websites, no real parent takes. So I figured I’d write that take for the next person searching.
We signed up in mid-January, and I was surprised how straightforward it was. For BC residents, tuition is free, all we needed was his student ID and a transcript from his in-person school to prove he was a grade 12 student. The course opened within three business days, and we got an immediate email from his instructor, a Nuu-chah-nulth educator based in Port Alberni, who introduced herself and said she checked email twice a day during the week. That was already better than the horror stories I’d heard about other online courses where instructors take a week to get back to you.
Jaden’s first reaction was that it wasn’t just a bunch of generic worksheets. The course is split into 8 units, most focused on BC Indigenous history and current issues, not the broad national stuff that gets two paragraphs in standard social studies textbooks. The first assignment let him pick a topic local to our area, so he chose the displacement of the Kwakwakaʼwakw village that stood where our town’s current waterfront park is now. He’d ridden his bike through that park a hundred times, but he’d never learned anything about the people who lived there before settlers came. The instructor encouraged him to reach out to the local band’s cultural department, and they connected him with an elder who agreed to an interview. I helped him drive over to the elder’s house one Saturday, waited in the car, and when he came out he was quiet, said he’d had no idea how much of that history was still not talked about in our town.
That March, he hit a wall. Between midterms for his in-person classes, cross-country provincials, and a part-time job at the local grocery store, EFP12 got pushed to the back burner. Because there are no daily classes or weekly hard deadlines built into the NIDES course—you get a suggested timeline, but you can work faster or slower depending on your schedule—he ended up two units behind three months in. I didn’t panic, but I also didn’t just tell him to “get it done”. We tried a trick that worked for his math homework a couple years back: we blocked 45 minutes every Tuesday and Thursday right after dinner, put the time in both our phone calendars, and I sat at the kitchen table with him while he worked. I wasn’t grading his assignments or hovering, I was just paying bills or planning the grocery list, same as I do most nights. That small routine made all the difference. He didn’t have to decide when to do it, it was just a scheduled part of the week, same as soccer practice. I’ve talked to two other local parents who also did EFP12 through NIDES in the last two years, and both of them said the biggest mistake they almost made was not setting that fixed routine upfront. It’s easy to think self-paced means “do it whenever”, but for most teens, whenever means never, at least until graduation is on the line.
The biggest surprise for me was how engaged Jaden stayed, even when he was busy. A lot of online courses feel like just checking a box for a credit, but the NIDES EFP12 is designed to let students adapt assignments to their own interests and communities. If your kid is into art, they can do an art project instead of a research paper. If they want to interview a community member instead of writing a book report, that’s encouraged. That flexibility isn’t just a nice bonus—it makes the work feel worth doing, which makes it easier to get done. The instructor also gave specific, actionable feedback, not just “good job” or “needs more detail”. When Jaden’s first draft of his project missed a key point about land title, she pointed him to a local archive source and asked him to add one paragraph, not rewrite the whole thing.
The only real downside we ran into was that if your kid needs constant in-person check-ins or structured daily class time to stay on track, this won’t work. A friend of mine tried this course with her son last year, who has ADHD and needs that daily face-to-face structure, and he ended up dropping it halfway through the semester to do a 3-week in-person intensive over the summer. That worked better for him. It’s not a one-size-fits-all option.
Jaden finished the course the second week of June, got a B+, and walked at graduation last month. His final project, the audio interview and research paper about the waterfront village, got shared by his instructor with the local school district, and now it’s being used as a resource for other local EFP classes. We still have a printed copy of the transcript taped to the side of our fridge, next to his cross-country medals and his little sister’s elementary school art.
It worked for our family, but I don’t say that to act like it’s the perfect option for everyone. If you’re sitting where I was last January, scrolling through Google trying to find someone who’s actually done this, that’s the long and short of it: it’s straightforward, it’s flexible, the instructors are responsive, and you just need to build a small consistent routine to keep on track. We went into it just trying to check a graduation requirement box, and we ended up with something that mattered more than most of Jaden’s other grade 12 classes. We’ll see what happens when my younger kid needs an online course in a couple years, but for this EFP 12 credit through NIDES, it was the right call for us.
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