EFP12 Online Through NIDES: One BC Parent’s Real Experience and What to Expect
It’s 7 p.m. at my kitchen table, crumbs from my 17-year-old son Jax’s salted caramel granola bar scattered across the crumpled BC graduation requirement printout we’d just picked up from the school board office. We’d moved to Vancouver Island from Alberta halfway through grade 11, and Jax was missing a mandatory credit: Exploration and First Peoples 12, required for every high school graduate in the province. In-person after-school classes at the local high school were full, and a friend mentioned NIDES, North Island Distance Education School, offered EFP12 fully online. I’d never heard of it, and a quick Google search turned up more questions than answers, so we jumped in blind.
Jax works 20 hours a week at a downtown skate shop, so the flexible self-paced structure sounded perfect on paper. He’s always hated early morning lectures and rigid due dates that don’t account for shift work, so we signed him up a week later. The orientation email came with a full outline of assignments, a link to the learning portal, and a 10-minute welcome voice note from his assigned teacher, Ms. Albright, instead of a mandatory 9 a.m. zoom call. Jax listened to it on his 15-minute break at work that day, which was way better than forcing him to rearrange his schedule just for a welcome meeting.
His first thought when he opened the course materials was that it would be just another online credit mill: generic readings, multiple-choice tests, check the box and move on. That’s what I’d heard from other parents about online graduation requirement courses, so I was prepared for that. The first assignment changed that: it asked students to visit a local public space managed or co-governed by an Indigenous nation in their area, and write a two-page reflection on what they learned that wasn’t in a textbook. Jax had been skating the Songhees Walkway for a year and a half, and he’d never even realized it’s co-managed by the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. He went on a Wednesday afternoon after his shift, talked to a park ranger who was a Songhees citizen for 10 minutes, took a few photos, and wrote the reflection that night. He came home and told me he’d never noticed the totem poles at the entrance had specific stories that weren’t marked on the little plaques, that the ranger told him the walkway was built on land that was returned to the nation in the 1990s. That’s the kind of thing he never would have gotten from a textbook chapter.
Of course, it wasn’t all smooth. Jax is good at managing his work schedule, but he’s terrible at remembering to check school emails. Three weeks into the course, he got wrapped up in a big shop sale for Halloween and forgot to submit an assignment or check in. I was waiting for a scary automated warning email, or a call from the administration saying he’d be dropped from the course. Instead, Ms. Albright sent a text to the number Jax put on his intake form (she’d asked first if texting was okay, which was a small thing that made a big difference) that just said “No rush, just checking in. Let me know if you need an extension or extra help on the last assignment.” No guilt, no penalties, just a quick check-in.
That’s the big thing I’ve learned from this experience that I wish I’d known before we started. If you’re considering EFP12 through NIDES for your kid, the biggest strength is that it’s built for kids who don’t fit the traditional in-person high school mold. It’s not for everyone, though. If your kid needs daily live classes and structured deadlines to stay on track, this probably isn’t a good fit. A friend of mine’s daughter tried it last year, and she struggled so much with the self-directed pace that she dropped it halfway through and took it in-person the next semester. That’s not a knock on NIDES, it’s just about matching the course to your kid’s needs.
For us, we made a small adjustment that made all the difference. We added a 2-minute check-in to our regular Sunday dinner. Jax just has to say how many assignments he finished that week, and if he needs help booking a time to talk to Ms. Albright. It’s not a big lecture about keeping up, it’s just a quick check that keeps him on track without adding stress. That’s a trick any parent can copy, it takes almost no time and it works way better than nagging every night. Another thing I recommend is asking NIDES to connect you with a recent parent or student before you sign up; they did that for us, and it helped us know exactly what to expect instead of going in blind.
Another unexpected plus: NIDES partners with local Indigenous organizations and museums to give students free access to events and exhibits for their assignments. Jax’s final project was a personal action project, where he had to do something small to advance reconciliation in his own community. He got a free pass to the Royal BC Museum’s Indigenous Peoples exhibit, did some research on local Indigenous skaters, and convinced his boss at the skate shop to let him add a monthly feature to the shop’s Instagram highlighting those skaters. He finished the course last month, got his credit, and he still posts the features every four weeks, just because he wants to.
Right now, Jax is wrapping up his remaining credits, and he’s on track to graduate in June. The course portal went down for 48 hours once last fall when NIDES updated their system, and tech support took a full day to get back to us, which Jax complained about for a week. It’s not perfect. You still have to put in the work, and it requires a baseline level of responsibility that not all 17 and 18 year olds have developed yet. But for a kid who works regular shifts, hates rigid school structure, just needed a way to get a required credit that didn’t feel like a waste of time, it worked way better than I expected.
I get at least three messages a month from other BC parents asking about EFP12 online options, especially through NIDES, since there’s not a lot of real talk about it online. I always tell them the same thing: if your kid needs flexibility, can work a little bit on their own, and you set up a quick low-stakes check-in system, it’s way more than just a checkmark for graduation. It’s not going to be the right fit for every kid, but it was the right fit for ours, and it might be for yours too.
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